Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers Studies in the Demographic History of Roman Italy 225 BC–AD 100

Recent years have witnessed an intense debate concerning the size of the population of Roman Italy. This book argues that the combined literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence supports the theory that early-imperial Italy had about six million inhabitants. At the same time the traditional view that the last century of the Republic witnessed a decline in the free Italian population is shown to be untenable. The main foci of its six chapters are: military participation rates; demographic recovery after the Second Punic War; the spread of slavery and the background to the Gracchan land reforms; the fast expansion of Italian towns after the Social War; emigration from Italy; and the fate of the Italian population during the first 150 years of the Principate.

1. Evidence, theories and models in Roman population history; 2. The Polybian manpower figures and the size of the Italian population on the eve of the Hannibalic War; 3. Census procedures and the meaning of the republican and early-imperial census figures; 4. Peasants, citizens and soldiers, 201 BC–28 BC; 5. The Augustan census figures and Italy's urban network; 6. Survey archaeology and demographic developments in the Italian countryside.

Luuk De Ligt is Professor of Ancient History at Universiteit Leiden. His book Fairs and Markets in the Roman Empire (1993) continues to be cited as a standard work on the rural economy of the Roman world. He has also published widely on the interplay between legal and economic developments with edited volumes including People, Land and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 BC–AD 14 (2008), which has been greeted as a compulsory starting point for all those aspiring to understand the demographic, economic, social and political structures of Roman Republican Italy.