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Anyone know a good source for infant mortality in the roman empire? I did some checking and found one source that estimated a 30% infant mortality in the city of rome. But this was city only. More checking found an average of 15-20% rate for medieval peasants.
I find it unlikely that the empire a whole has a worse mortality than the medieval period.
Any help is appreciated.
Timothy Hanna
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You might try Brunt's Italian Manpower. Unfortunately I read a library copy, so don't have it handy to cite anything, but I do remember he claimed that almost the entire growth of the city of Rome itself came from immigration because the mortality rate was so high in the urban area. It was a fascinating book. Brunt also freely admitted what we don't know about the ancient population, which is quite a lot. The book was published in the 1970s, I think, so there are probably more recent estimates out there now.
Doing some internet searching of scholarly journals, I found numbers ranging from 25% to 40%.
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Quote:Anyone know a good source for infant mortality
Of course you meant "a good source for infant mortality
statistics, right? :lol: :!:
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)
Saepe veritas est dura.
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Oh, good. Because the source for the other kind is "Irritation and Frustration". Only now they call the Child Protective Services. Can't just set them out on a snowy rocky outcrop when you get tired of them these days--though when I had 5 teenagers at once in my house, the thought did occasionally cross my mind....
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)
Saepe veritas est dura.
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The current thinking is that mortality in the ancient world is best modeled using one of the high mortality Coale-Demeny models (either West or South, somewhere between level 1 and level 6).
In practical terms, that means that something on the order of half of all of the children born in any given year may have died by the age of 10, with mortality in the first year of life somewhere on the order of 20-30%. In this model overall life expectancy at birth is low, i.e. somewhere between 20-30 years, precisely because infant mortality is so high.
The book by Parkin cited above is decent. There's also a good short introduction by Bruce Frier in the Cambridge Ancient History (2nd edition), Volume 11 (The High Empire), pp. 787-816. The census declarations from Roman Egypt are probably the best actual ancient source; See the book on this by Bagnall and Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt.
