City Population in Roman North Africa

City Population in Roman AfricaAuthor(s): R. P. Duncan-JonesSource: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 53, Parts 1 and 2 (1963), pp. 85-90Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/298367 .Accessed: 30/12/2013 09:17

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CITY POPULATION IN ROMAN AFRICA By R. P. DUNCAN-JONES

Modern assessments of city population in the Roman provinces of Africa have been based on notions about the numbers that a given area of land is likely to have supported; 1 upon estimates of the size of the piped water-supply; 2 upon comparisons between ancient and modern city areas; 3 and upon inferences from the density of surviving Roman remains.4 Reference has also sometimes been made to the seating capacity of theatres or amphitheatres.5 While each of these methods can suggest loose probabilities, none of them provides firm or precise information.

Deductions from the maximum agricultural potential can be applied only to the few cities the extent of whose territory is known; even then, there are always large uncertainties about the efficiency of ancient agriculture in the area concerned and about the degree to which local produce was supplemented with imports from elsewhere.6 Estimates of piped water-supply have little demographic relevance, for there is no reliable way of ascertaining the amount of water used per person; this method is also misleading in that it cannot take account of the amount of drinking water obtained from wells and rainwater cisterns. Comparisons of ancient and modern city areas of the kind made by Courtois tell us little about numbers, since ancient population density has never been established; 7 furthermore, such comparisons are obliged to omit the inhabitants who lived outside the walls but within the territory of the city. Arguments from the overall density of remains rest on unverifiable assumptions about the relationship between human numbers and material remains; they are also at the mercy of the chances affecting the survival of monuments over a period of I,500 years.8 Finally, we do not know what proportion of the total population theatres or amphitheatres were intended to seat on a single occasion; in many cases their size probably depended more on what money was available for their construction than on exact notions of the seating capacity appropriate to the town.9

Whatever speculative estimates may be made by such methods as those described so far, it is plain that where they are available contemporary figures should come first in any consideration of city population. It is the object of this paper to examine a piece of epigraphic evidence for urban numbers in Africa overlooked hitherto.

We must first define what is meant here by the phrase ' city population'. In modern usage, this denotes simply those who live within the built-up area of an agglomeration large enough to be called a town. In the Roman world, in which every man traced his origo to some one city, the influence of cities was more comprehensive than to-day, but urbanization was generally looser. The ordinary local provincial town was not primarily a residential centre. Instead, it was a civilized nucleus which provided a place of residence for the few who could afford to live away from the soil and offered facilities of various sorts to the rest. It was the centre of worship for all, and the greater number of its public buildings

1 S. Gsell and A. Joly, Khamissa, Mdaourouch, Announa II, ' Mdaourouch ' (I922), i8 ff. I have been indebted for advice to Mr. N. H. Carrier, Miss K. Duncan-Jones, Mr. M. I. Finley, Professor D. V. Glass, Monsieur J. Guey, Mr. M. K. Hopkins, Mr. A. W. James, and Professor A. H. M. Jones ; but responsibility for the views expressed here is entirely my own.

2 P. Grimal, ' Les fouilles de Siga,' Melanges de l'cole francaise a Rome 1937, I I7.

3 C. Courtois, Les Vandales et l'Afrique (I955), I04 ff.

4 G. C.-Picard, La Civilisation de l'Afrique romaine (I959), 44-59.

5 cf. for instance R. M. Haywood in T. Frank, Economic Survey of Ancient Rome IV (1938), II2. Another survey of African population is given by J. C. Russell, 'Late Ancient and Mediaeval Popula- tion,' Trans. Amer. Philos. Soc. XLVIII, 3 (I958), 67

and 76; but this discussion contains too many errors of fact and method to be considered seriously.

6 It would be mistaken to contend that there was no noticeable internal trade in essential foodstuffs for both grain and oil were needed everywhere, yet many cities grew only one of these crops on their own territories in any abundance (cf. Picard, o.c. (n. 4), 74).

See the criticisms made by Picard, o.c. (n. 4), 47. 8These strictures of course do not apply to esti-

mates for towns like Pompeii and Ostia, cities with a substantial urban population, whose miraculous state of preservation allows calculations of this type to be made with some prospect of success. cf. R. Meiggs, Roman Ostia (I960), 532 ff.

9 It is also difficult to see any demographic logic behind the fact that at a given town the amphitheatre usually seats considerably more people than the theatre and the circus sometimes a larger number still.


86 R. P. DUNCAN-JONES

were almost always temples ; it was the centre of administration; the source of legal decisions; the commercial centre; the centre of hygiene and medicine; the centre of social life; and the place where entertainments were held. Though no conclusion about the distribution of human numbers can here be more than inferential, it is generally clear from the abundance of large public buildings, and the high proportion of the total city area that they occupied, that the urban unit existed for the use of a community much larger than could have been contained in the relatively few houses within the built-up area.10 Thus when we speak of city population in the sense true in our period, it is unhistorical to exclude the citizens who lived on the soil, and to count only those who lived intra muros."1

The inscription 12 that we shall discuss comes from Siagu, in Zeugitana (Tunisia), an ancient town now largely buried under olive groves, which lies 4 km. inland from Hammamet, on the north-eastern coast of Tunisia. The surviving lines read:-

... [fut]uris ludi et specta[cula] omnibus annis die X [Kal. I]anuar. edantur ob dedicatio[nem] statua[e] ludi triduo edantur in quorum editione erogari voluit *oo d et reliquis *oo omnibus civibus N HS dividi volo.

... that in all future years games and spectacles should be given on the 23rd of December; that games lasting three days should be given at the dedication of the statue, on whose staging he wished I,500 denarii to be spent; ' and I wish the remaining i,ooo denarii to be distributed to all the citizens at the rate of one sestertius per head '.

This is a private gift, whose main constituent was evidently a foundation to provide games on one day each year, probably the birthday of the donor or of one of his family. The perpetual series of games on a single day each year was to be inaugurated by a specially large occasion in the first year, a series lasting three days. The lines missing at the top must have given the donor's name, with some phrase such as ' testamento suo praecepit ', for this is undoubtedly a bequest.13 There must also have been a mandate for the erection of the statue (of the donor) whose dedication is mentioned and from whose base the inscription probably comes.

The financial details I have discussed elsewhere ; 14 the only feature of importance here is the last provision of all, the distribution of sportulae to the citizens. It is evident that the donor envisaged 4,ooo recipients, since he provided the sum of i,ooo denarii for this purpose and prescribed a rate of one sesterce, or a quarter of a denarius, per head. There is no reason to think that the monetary indications are corrupt and none of the three pairs of symbols are easily confused with any others. The two provisions whose cost survives are complementary, totalling io,ooo sesterces.'5

This shows that there were roughly 4,000 citizens at Siagu.16 For the rate of distribution 10 A rural analogy is provided by the letter in which

the younger Pliny describes his plan to enlarge a temple on one of his estates, adding a separate portico for the use of the country people who come to visit the shrine, both to make transactions there and to sacrifice (Ep. IX, 39).

11 This generalization applies only to the general run of secondary towns, which formed the majority. The really large towns, where private residences could be numbered in thousands rather than in hundreds (as well as some smaller coastal cities), were often closer to modern towns in their density of population.

12 CIL VIII, 967 + I2448. 13 The last phrase is a direct quotation from the

will ; cf. ILS 68I8. 14 In ' Costs, outlays and summae honorariae from

Roman Africa', Papers of the British School at Rome xxx (I962), (hereafter referred to as CSRA), no. z59 + appendix, p. I I4. One feature was omitted from the account given in that article: the donor must have left money to pay for the statue to whose dedication he refers, at least judging by the analogy of CSRA no. 262. The total bequest thus probably amounted to more than HS 50,000; all the parallels suggest that the total would have been a round sum

nonetheless, probably HS 6o,ooo, the next obvious possibility above HS 50,000.

15 The authority behind the text is good: the squeeze was seen by Wilmanns and Schmidt and Mommsen was responsible for part of the restoration.

16 Some no doubt will conjecture that ' civibus ' here denotes the whole citizen population, men, women and children. The ample surviving evidence for ephemeral distributions in Africa (see CIL viii, supp. v, pp. 339-340) does not support this view. I can find no African text which overtly suggests that any but male adults were included in such distributions (the serious philanthropy represented by the alimentary schemes for both sexes was something entirely different). In fact the gifts generally have an exclusive character : the cash sportulae, usually of several sesterces per head, tended to be reserved for the small body of decurions, while generosity to the citizens was often confined to gifts of oil (' gym- nasium ', see CSRA n. I5I, p. iii) or games, whose cost per head probably worked out at a fraction of a sesterce. The donor of the present gift was liberal enough to extend his cash distribution beyond the ordo decurionum, but in the absence of any phrase such as ' utriusque sexus ' (found in Italy, cf. ILS 6643), it is difficult to think that he included women, still less children, in his bounty.


CITY POPULATION IN ROMAN AFRICA 87

is a very low one, in fact the lowest of those found in the fifteen African distributions whose details are known; 17 in the other fourteen, the rate per head is always at least twice as large as this. Had it been plain to the Siagu donor that his town had a number of citizens much smaller than 4,ooo, he would almost certainly have chosen a more generous sportula per man. On the other hand, the number can hardly have been very much more than 4,000, in view of the phrase ' omnibus civibus '. The exact total was clearly only a matter of financial convenience and there is no reason to think that the human total corresponded with it very closely. Nevertheless, this cannot have been very different from the figures indicated, since local census returns were compiled for the payment of tributum capitis; 18 if the donor was a member of the local ordo, as is probable, these details would have been known to him. We know from an Italian inscription that an effective civic organization was already functioning at Siagu as early as the reign of Tiberius; 19 the present gift was probably made at least a century later.20

Before considering wider implications, we should define the most extreme possibilities that might underlie this statistic. The upward limit is shadowy, but it would have been unseemly to have omitted more than, say, one-fifth of the citizens from a distribution nominally intended to benefit them all. The smallest number that could plausibly be meant is probably in the region of 3,000-2,700. For had there been as few as 2,666 citizens or less, the donor could have prescribed a higher sportula, 6 asses (or i sesterces) per head, which is probably the lowest rate above i sesterce that could be countenanced. Hence the range of possibilities behind the literal indication of 4,000 citizens runs from approximately 3,000-5,000. It is unlikely that the donor would have assigned a sum noticeably in excess of what was needed for the purpose specified,21 so the lower demographic possibility is the less persuasive.22

The age-group with which our statistic corresponds is probably that of men of eighteen and above.23 It is found that in the modern society whose mortality pattern corresponds most closely with that of Roman Africa, this age-group constitutes about 26 of the total 3j6 population.24 Thus the factor of multiplication to apply in order to estimate the total free population is about 31. Hence the literal total at Siagu is approximately I4,000; using the extremes arrived at above, this might in fact have been as high as I7,500, or, less probably, as low as IO,500. Since there is no basis for choosing to compensate in either direction, we retain the figure of I4,000 for the total citizen population. We need not think this an implausibly large total for the free population of a minor town in the Roman Empire: Pliny's three sets of figures for parts of Spain each give an average taxable free population of about ii,ooo per community.25

Something should also be added to the Siagu figure to allow for slaves: references to

17 CSRA nos. 290-305. 18Digest L. I5. 4. 19 CIL v, 4922. 20 Chronological concentrations of gifts are dis-

cussed in CSRA Part i, pp. 52-56. 21 The annual surpluses known in privately given

perpetual foundations in Africa are all very small: i 6, 1, 0 3I and o i6 per cent (CSRA nos. 258, 257, 248, 250, cf. appendix, pp. II3-I4).

22 I,000 sesterces, the amount that would have been wasted had there been only 3,000 recipients of the gift, was not a negligible sum (cf. CSRA Part i, pp. 64-5).

23 Eighteen was the age at which decurial obliga- tions began during the period when they were being spread most widely (Cod. Theod. xii, i, i9) * the age at which eligibility had begun in the earlier period had been twenty-five (Digest L. 2. i i). Legionary recruitment began at seventeen (Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire, s.v. ' Legio ').

24 Close resemblances between the mortality curve for pre-Christian Roman Africa and that for India in I90I have been established by A. R. Burn ('Hic breve vivitur', Past and Present, November, I953, 2-3I). Mortality alone is not a reliable index, but a factor of 31 also corresponds closely with what we

should expect from the total reproduction rate of 5-6 implied by the African figures for life-expectation compiled by Bum, l.c. It is clear that population in second-century Africa, as in India sixty years ago, was rising (Tertullian, De anima 30). A further resemblance between the two societies lies in the lowness of the age of marriage permitted to girls. (cf. A. G. Harkness, 'Age at Marriage and at Death in the Roman Empire,' TAPhA xxvii (I896), 35-72 ; Harkness is too sceptical of the evidence for early marriages that he collects.) Age-distribution for India in I90I is given in ' The Aging of Populations and its economic and social implications ', United Nations Population Studies no. 26 (I956), II 2.

25 NH III, 3, 28. There is remarkable consistency between the three average figures, all of which refer to places in the north-west of the Spanish peninsula, part of Hispania Tarraconensis under the Romans. The averages are: i0,909 per community for the Astures, who inhabited part of the modern inland province of Leon (twenty-two populi with 240,000 libera capita in all); I i,o66 for the conventus Lucensis, the modern province of Lugo (fifteen populi with I66,ooo libera capita); and Ii,875 for the Bracares, who belonged to what is now northern Portugal (twenty-four civitates with 285,000 capita).


88 R. P. DUNCAN-JONES slaves and freedmen are by no means rare in the epigraphy of the African cities.26 We know the size of individual slave-holdings in Africa in a few cases. Q. Servaeus Fuscus Cornelianus, a senator who lived at Gigthis in the early Severan period, had enough freedmen and freedwomen to justify founding an alimentary scheme to maintain them; there were probably at least ioo beneficiaries, as in the similar gift by the younger Pliny.27 Cornelianus doubtless also retained slaves whom he did not manumit.28 The writer and sophist Apuleius, son of a wealthy member of the municipal aristocracy and still a decurion of Madauros at the time of his Apology,29 seems to have had a number of slaves before his marriage to a widow wealthier than himself. His reply in the Apology to the conflicting allegations that he had reached Oea with only one slave, and that he had manumitted three slaves at that town on a single day, is more concerned with exposing the ignorance of his accuser than with telling the facts of the case; but the trend of his argument suggests that he had come to Oea with more than three slaves. It is quite clear, at any rate, that both Apuleius and his audience considered that it would seem very niggardly for a man of substantial means to travel with a single slave. The subject of slaves is introduced 30 in this speech with an insult to his accuser, in which Apuleius professes neither to know nor care whether Aemilianus works his estate with slaves, or runs it in collaboration with his neighbours, the latter being plainly the less honourable alternative. Later on, it transpires that Apuleius and his wife Pudentilla now themselves maintained an establishment of fifteen slaves at their town house in Oea 31 and that Pudentilla had at least 400 slaves in all,32 mostly no doubt on her distant country estate.33 This evidence suggests that it was the custom for the municipal aristocracy to own slaves in some numbers both as household servants and as agricultural workers.34

But all the information from Apuleius belongs to a wealthy milieu, in which fortunes were reckoned in millions,35 and like the evidence from Gigthis, it offers no direct clue to the frequency of slave-owning lower down in the social scale. We must admit that if it was the custom for the ordinary well-to-do African to own a few slaves, there is no obvious reason why any commemoration of this fact should have reached us.36 Monumental funerary stelai could often cost as much as slaves themselves 37 and so it is unlikely that slave burials would leave any identifiable traces surviving to the present day. Nevertheless, it seems likely a priori that in a society as intensely hierarchical as that of the Roman Empire, the small landowner would often have acquired slaves in emulation of his superiors, provided that the supply was sufficient. To reckon crudely, if the owner of a fortune of 4 million sesterces 38 could achieve a holding of 400 slaves, it seems possible that anyone whose income was as little as 2,000 sesterces per year could have afforded one or two slaves. Certainly the richest families of each town would have owned them in some numbers. The sum of, money spent in the Siagu gift (probably 6o,ooo sesterces) would actually have bought thirty or more slaves; and of course private resources very much larger than the gift itself are implied here. If we allow an average of one slave to every household,39 assuming that some had many slaves, others none, a servile population of approximately 3,000 should be added to the 14,000 citizens and their families at Siagu, making a total of 17,000.

We have now reached a figure which is perhaps large for a peregrine civitas; the estimate for slaves is admittedly tentative, but even if this is disregarded, it does not affect the significance of the total, for the main calculation is not liable to the same uncertainties.

26' Servus ' and ' libertus ' in index to CIL viii. 27 CIL VIII, 22721, cf. ILS 2927. 28 cf. Apuleius, Apol. I7: 'Ne illud quidem credi-

bile fuisset, cum tribus (servis) venisse, omnis liberasse.'

29 ibid. 24. 30 ibid. 17. 31 ibid. 43-5. 32 ibid. 93. 33 ibid. 44. 34 Gsell gives an excellent discussion, citing other

authors besides Apuleius ('Esclaves ruraux dans l'Afriqueromaine ', Melanges Glotz I (1932), 395-4I5).

35 Apuleius, Apol. 23, 75, 77.

36 Gsell (o.c., n. 34) comes to the same conclusion. 37 Compare slave-prices listed by A. H. M. Jones

in Slavery in Classical Antiquity (ed. M. I. Finley, ig6o), 9-I0, with stele-costs in CSRA nos. 226-244. The laws of the funeral college at Lanuvium allowed for the possibility that its slave-members might receive ' iniqu(a) sepultura' from their masters, ILS 7212, pag. II, 1. 4.

38 These were the resources of Pudentilla, wife of Apuleius, Apol. 77, 93.

39 Galen could assume that there were as many slaves as male citizens at Pergamum in the mid- second century, De cognoscendis curandisque animi morbis 9 v V 49 Kuhn.


CITY POPULATION IN ROMAN AFRICA 89 At the lowest, the population of Siagu cannot have been much less than I4,000, while it may have been well above this figure.

The physical size of the town is not very clear from the archaeological evidence, for there has been no excavation; 40 and the extent of the adjoining territory is not known. Siagu was closely crowded to north and south by the territory of other cities 41 and to the east by the coast; but there is no obvious neighbour westwards for at least I5 km., though the terrain becomes mountainous and arid before Djebel Zit. The plan of the town itself given in Gauckler's survey 40 seems to indicate that the longer axis of the urban area measured at least I km. and that the area, excluding the cemetery to the north-west, was between 50 and 6o hectares.42 This is quite large, comparable with the area of secondary towns well-known to us, such as Thamugadi 43 and Thubursicu Numidarum,44 and considerably larger than others such as Cuicul,45 Madauros,46 Thugga 47 and MuZuc.48 On the other hand, it is small compared with the more considerable secondary towns whose area is known, such as Thelepte,49 Diana Veteranorum,50 Althiburos,51 Leptis Minor 52 and Thaenae.53

The present calculation thus strongly suggests that the upward limit of population reached at towns of the second rank in Africa was a good deal higher than the figure of io,ooo recently proposed as the general maximum.54 Siagu, one of the lesser cities of its district, had noticeably more than io,ooo, and so the towns whose area was much larger, of which those enumerated above are only a few, may well often have had a free population of over zo,ooo, save in cases where the extent of their fertile territory was disproportionately small. But it would be unscientific to go further and conclude that since Siagu, which probably never achieved a higher status than that of peregrine civitas,55 had I4,000 or more inhabitants, every African city must have had a population of at least this size. For Siagu, despite its total lack of political recognition, was a place of some substance in its day. Many towns never built as many aqueducts, nor spread so wide.

It is worth noticing in conclusion that Siagu was by origin not a Roman, but a Punic town, still governed by sufetes in the time of Tiberius.56 Thus, unlike other African cities such as Thamugadi or Cuicul, it was not primarily a product of Roman colonization, even though it was well Romanized by the second century, as we can see from the Latin inscriptions and the ambitious water-system. It is conceivable that the long period of

40 Notices of Siagu: V. Gu6rin, Voyage en Tunisie (I862) II, 259-26I ; C. Tissot, Geographie comparie de la province romaine d'Afrique ii (i888), I29-I3I ; Babelon, Cagnat, Reinach, Atlas archeo- logique de la Tunisie (I893-1926), fe. 37, 3 (this is the correct map-reference; the commentary is given under fe. 37, 4) ; P. Gauckler, Enquete sur les installa- tions hydrauliques romaines en Tunisie (i897-I902), 233-8, plan 234; L. Poinssot in Atlas historique, geographique, economique et touristique de la Tunisie (ed. C. Leconte, J. Despois, G. Garbe, F. Gerard, 1936), 34; M. Parisot, Tunisie (Guides Bleu, I955), 76. Constructions listed in these works include baths, three aqueducts, a nymphaeum, a large reservoir, a number of wells, twenty-five private cisterns, a Christian basilica and a Byzantine fortress.

41 Pupput, which lies 4 km. to the south-west, had a territory of about 40 sq. krn. (W. Seston in Bull. arch. du Com. des trav. hist. 1946-49, 309-311). Neapolis lies 13 km. north-west of Siagu, Vina I o km. north by west. All these towns were politically more important than Siagu, the first two being colonies, the third a municipium. Smaller neighbours were Thinissut, 4 km. north by east of Siagu, and Tubernuc, 15 km. to the north-west. See inset ' Les grandes carrefours de la region de Carthage' in map in P. Salama, Les Voies romaines de l'Afrique du nord (ig5i).

42 If the buildings to the west (marked G on the plan and referred to in the text as important remains) were part of the main complex.

43 50 hectares, C. Courtois, Timgad, antique Thamugadi ( I950I, 19.

446o hectares (see n. i above). 45 About 12 hectares from plan in L. Leschi,

Djemila, antique Cuicul (1953). 46 20 hectares (see n. i above). 47 Roughly 20 hectares of main area from plan in

C. Poinssot, Les Ruines de Dougga (I958). 48 Muzuc (Henchir Khachoun) had an area of at

least I5 hectares, Tissot (o.c., n. 40), ii, 603. 49 5oo hectares, Gauckler (o.c., n. 40), but the plan

on p. 154 suggests 300 hectares as a more likely figure.

50 400 hectares, Tissot (o.c., n. 40), II, 484. 51' 200 'hectares, Gauckler (o.c., n. 40), 144-6 ; but

again the plan (p. 146) suggests a lower figure, 150 hectares.

52 At least I2o hectares from plan in Babelon (o.c., n. 40), fe. 66, 7.

53 Over Ioo hectares, plan in Gauckler (o.c., n. 40), 259.

54 By G. C.-Picard, La Civilisation de l'Afrique romaine (1959), 178.

55 The town was still a civitas in A.D. 215, when the main series of promotions of African cities was almost over (CIL VIII, 966) ; there are no inscriptions dateable to later than the third century (though the total number that have been found is very small); and no bishop of Siagu appears in the abundant Christian lists for Africa that run from the third to the seventh centuries A.D. Yet the site cannot have been completely abandoned in antiquity if the Byzantines thought it worth fortifying in the sixth century.

56 CIL V, 4922.


90 CITY POPULATION IN ROMAN AFRICA

occupation and development meant that by this date Siagu was more densely populated than other cities which had grown up in a shorter time. Yet the complete political and historical obscurity of the town, relieved only by a mention in Ptolemy's Geography,57 does suggest that as far as absolute size was concerned, it cannot have had much importance. If Siagu was well populated, this is probably more a reflection of the general condition of towns in the fertile province of Zeugitana in the second century than an indication of peculiarly high local density.

APPENDIX

At least three other statistics for the free population of inland cities of the Roman Empire have survived. Although they all concern cities whose built-up area was considerably larger than that of Siagu, these figures are worth mentioning for purposes of comparison. The earliest refers to Apamea, in Syria, giving a total of I I7,000 at the time of a census held in A.D. 6/7 (ILS 2683, a text with Mommsen's authority for its authenticity). Cumont has argued plausibly that the ' homines cives ' spoken of denote the total citizen population of both sexes and all ages (JRS XXIV, I934, I87-I90). But Cumont's view that these ' citizens ' are necessarily a limited section of the free population is misguided: for whether or not Apamea (like Tarsus a century later) restricted local political rights to those of a certain economic competence, the government would certainly have wanted to know for tax purposes the total free population of the city. Nothing suggests that liability to tributum capitis was restricted to those who had the local franchise, although slaves were exempt. Hence II7,000 should probably be accepted as the total number of free inhabitants of Apamea under Augustus.

The second figure also comes from the East. Galen suggests that in his time, the mid-second century A.D., there were 40,000 male adult citizens of Pergamum (n. 39 above). Applying the ratio of 3 1 devised elsewhere (n. 24 above), the implied total free population is of the order of I40,000.

The last figure belongs to the reign of Constantine and is thus much later than any of the evidence cited so far. The town is Augustodunum (Autun), in Gallia Lugdunensis, whose assessment for poll-tax was reduced by Constantine, as a favour, from 32,000 to 25,000 (Panegyricus VIII [v], II ; A. H. M. Jones, JRS XLVII, I957, 92). This indicates that Augustodunum numbered roughly 32,000 free men and women among its inhabitants in the early fourth century and suggests a total free population, including those under fourteen, in the region of 50,000.

Apamea, Pergamum and Augustodunum all ranked among the major cities of their respective provinces and it is not surprising that they should each dwarf Siagu in their number of inhabitants. But the statistics given by Pliny for sixty-one Spanish communities (n. 25 above), though drawn from a somewhat backward area, suggest that the total of roughly I4,000 at Siagu may be representative of the normal average size of town population in the west.

57 ItayoiA, Ptolemy IV, 3 ; conjunction with Neapolis in Ptolemy's list makes the identification certain.


Article Contentsp. [85]p. 86p. 87p. 88p. 89p. 90

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 53, Parts 1 and 2 (1963), pp. i-xii+1-282Volume Information [pp. 269-281]Front Matter [pp. i-xi]Polybius and Rome's Eastern Policy [pp. 1-13]Some Political Notions in Coin Types between 294 and 313 [pp. 14-20]Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus [pp. 21-28]The Fiscus in the First Two Centuries [pp. 29-42]Palmyra under the Aegis of Rome [pp. 43-54]Ten Tribunes [pp. 55-60]The Establishment of the Equester Ordo [pp. 61-72]Some Observations on Early Roman Corinthian [pp. 73-84]City Population in Roman Africa [pp. 85-90]Agathias and Cedrenus on Julian [pp. 91-94]An Interim Report on the Origins of Rome [pp. 95-121]A Curse Tablet from Nottinghamshire [pp. 122-124]Roman Britain in 1962: I. Sites Explored: II. Inscriptions [pp. 125-167]Obituary: Arthur Darby Nock [pp. 168-169]Reviews and DiscussionsReview: untitled [pp. 170-176]Review: untitled [pp. 176-179]

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The Following Works Have Also Been Received [pp. 255-259]Proceedings of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1962-63 [p. 260]Report of the Council for 1962 [pp. 261-267]Back Matter

Documents

City Population in Roman North Africa