Thread by @BretDevereaux

Well, people seemed to like my little Julius Caesar chart, so why not tweet out some of my other lecture aids.

Here is a set of four charts I use to help students visualize ancient social classes, starting with Fifth century BC Athens (bibliographic discussion at the end): 1/23

And then we can compare very early fifth century Sparta: 2/23

And my latest addition to the block-charts, the same method but applied to the Roman Republic in 225 (it's a big chart, you may want to zoom in): 3/23

I made these because the simplistic 'social pyramids' I kept seeing in textbooks don't really capture the often unique shape of social classes in these societies, particularly the often fat bulge of free-holding farmers who are neither rich, nor poor (by ancient standards). 4/23

The charts also make clear both how much *larger* the Roman Republic is compared to even a very big Greek polis AND how limited personal and political freedom is in Sparta. I made a set of pie-charts to express that too: 5/23

Ok, neat charts, now for 'ancient demography is complicated bibliography time.' First I want to note that all of these charts do some aggressive rounding (often to the nearest 10,000 or 100,000); they are not precise even to the estimates I am using. 6/23

I think they convey order of magnitude, but obviously a lot of detail is missed.

So where are my numbers (very, VERY roughly) from? 7/23

ATHENS: the figures are substantially based on M.H. Hansen, Demography and Democracy: The Number of Athenian citizens in the fourth century (1986). I used that because more recent studies... 8/23

...(e.g. Hansen's Shotgun Method (2006) or Corvisier, La population de l’Antiquité classique (2000)) focus on total numbers and don't consider breakdown by social class.

I should also note the social class breakdown for Athens is probably the *most* speculative here. 8/23

SPARTA: Estimates here follow as noted P. Cartledge, Agesilaus and the Crisis of Sparta (1987) and R.J.A. Talbert, "The Role of the Helots in the Class Struggle at Sparta" Historia (1989). Thomas J. Figueira has argued for a smaller number of helots... 9/23

...(in Helots and Their Masters in Laconia and Messenia (2003)), roughly 118k (a bit more than half my figure here); I think this is useful as a lower bound but I suspect helot labor was less efficiently deployed than he assumes and thus am comfortable with a higher figure. 10/23

ROME: The basis for these figures fundamentally derives from Polybius' account of the manpower available to Rome in 225 (thus the precise year), Plb. 2.24.

Those figures are MUCH better than the evidence for Sparta or Athens, but their interpretation is fraught. 11/23

Substantially I follow L. Deligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012) on the general figures here. I accept N. Rosenstein's downward adjustment of estimates of the number of capiti censi (Rome at War (2004)) and @DrMichaelJTayl1 's breakdown of the... 12/23

...assidui and proletarii, as well as the split between the equites cum equo publico vs. cum equo suo (Soldiers & Silver (2020)).

For Roman demography nerds, this means I adopt a high version of the 'low count.' 13/23

For non-Roman citizens, things get dicey fast. Polybius gives us totals for the number of allies who serve as cavalry and the number that serve as infantry. I have assumed - and this is a HEROIC assumption - that the social class breakdown in the... 14/23

...various non-Roman Italian allies looks broadly like the Roman one. This informs the estimate for the propertyless poor (the equivalent of the Roman capite censi) in the rest of Italy. That is essentially a raw guess and could be substantially off. 15/23

For Enslaved Persons, I have accepted the guess made by P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower: 225 BC - AD 14 (1971) of around half a million and split it evenly between Romans and Italians. That even split gives the Romans *somewhat* higher percentage of enslaved persons... 16/23

...but honestly the real ratio likely has far more (but by no means all) of the enslaved people held in Roman communities.

The figure for the number of enslaved people at this point is, however, little more than a fairly blind guess. 17/23

That c. 500k figure also does not reflect, of course, the dramatic growth in the number of enslaved people in Roman Italy was a result of Rome's conquests in the 100s (which haven't happened yet). 18/23

Finally, a note on age and gender. I have assumed here very roughly that adult males (the thing our ancient sources measure) comprise about a third of total people, but the blocks represent adults and of course both men and women. 19/23

With two exceptions I have assumed rough gender parity. First, I think it is reasonable to suppose that the population of resident foreigners in Athens (the metics) might have been male-shifted, given who was likely to go to Athens. That is very speculative. 20/23

Second, there are no women or children in the Roman Senate. During the Republic, there was no 'ordo senatorius' or senatorial order, merely individuals who were senators (that is, no special *legal* status attached to the wife, son or daughter of a senator). 21/23

Consequently, the Senate is represented exactly as its c. 300 normal members; their families are grouped with the equites.

Technically Roman women weren't in any of these census classes, but pretending that the family of a senator had the same status as the family of a... 22/23

...proletarius is clearly absurd and our status-conscious Roman women let us know it and it seems truer to the actual structure of Roman society to group women (and children) with their family's status.

And those are the charts. Cheers!

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