Health and Wealth in the Roman Empire (2019)

Health and wealth in the Roman Empire

Highlights

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We present the largest dataset of skeletal data for Roman history.

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We do not attempt to reconstruct stature, but opt for trends in factor scores.

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We find a downward trend until the first century AD, and improvement thereafter.

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Our measure correlates negatively with population, but also with wages or diets.

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Romans paid a health price for their material wealth.

Abstract

Ancient Rome was the largest and most populous empire of its time, and the largest pre-industrial state in European history. Recent though not universally accepted research suggests that at least for the most populous central periods of its history standard of living was also rather higher than before or after. To trace whether this is also reflected in Roman biological standard of living, we present the first large and more or less comprehensive dataset, based on skeletal data for some 10,000 individuals, covering all periods of Roman history, and all regions (even if inevitably unequally). We discuss both the methodologies that we developed and the historical results. Instead of reconstructing heights from the long bones assuming fixed body proportions or from one individual long bone, we apply exploratory factor analysis and calculate factor scores for 50-year periods. Our measure of the biological standard of living declined during the last two centuries B.C. and started to improve again, slowly at first, from the second century A.D. It correlated negatively with population, but also with other aspects of standard of living such as wages or diets.

JEL classification

C55

C82

N01

N33

O01

O52

Keywords

Biological standard of living

Roman Empire

skeleton remains

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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