Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy by Robert Sallares (beach read .TXT) 📕

pyramids emphasize the instability of the Tuscan population described in the Catasto. At the same time, they reveal the obstacles involved in utilizing for historical purposes model life tables which are based on stable or stationary populations . . . the age pyramid of 1427 does not fit any of the theoretical distributions closely.⁴⁴

Of course it can be argued that the situation in Florence in 1427

was exceptional because of the effects of massive plague epidemics.

Nevertheless the fact remains that the first major source of quanti-fiable demographic information in Italian history provides no support whatsoever for the hypothesis that model life-tables based on data from normal modern populations are likely to be useful for ancient populations afflicted by diseases which are no longer endemic in modern Europe. Moreover the situation in antiquity was itself not static, since disease evolution and history is a never-ending process. The spread of malaria in Italy in the first millennium  created new demographic patterns in both time and space. The demographic patterns of much of Latium and Etruria in the first century  were probably completely different from what they had been in the seventh century .

There is yet another methodological issue of fundamental importance at stake here. Hopkins entitled his well-known article ‘ On the probable age-structure of the Roman population’. This begs the question of whether the Roman population had an age-structure.

Or, to put the question more precisely, making explicit a crucial assumption implicitly made by Hopkins, did the Roman population as a whole have a single age-structure? The answer to that question ⁴³ Coale and Demeny (1983: 33) stated that ‘any extraordinary incidence of a cause of death that is highly age-and-sex specific produces a mortality schedule that naturally does not conform to the model tables’. Populations affected by malaria evidently fall into this category.

⁴⁴ Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber (1985: 195).

Geographical contrasts

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must be no, taking account of the prevalence in historical populations of the type of regional variation which has been discussed here. The inference is clear. The age-structure of the Roman population is an illegitimate concept. The homogeneity of modern populations is a consequence of the process of modernization.

Only an anachronistic, modernizing approach to ancient history can imagine such homogeneity in ancient populations.

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