Unfortunately, as with most instances of historical demographics, there
are no exact numbers. However, I have read that in the half century or
so before the Roman conquest, the Balkans had a population around the
avenue of three million people. The time period might be a couple of
centuries away from Alexander, but I do not believe the population
would have been too much different.
I could find out the population of some greek cities in Alexander's time but i am not sure about the entire greek population.
From memory, i remember the population of Athens around 312 BC to be like this:
- Citizens 21,000 (over 20 years old)
- Metics 10,000
- Slaves 400,000
A mathematician is a person who thinks that if there are supposed to be three people in a room, but five come out, then two more must enter the room in order for it to be empty.
Btw I have read somewhere that in the 5th century BC the population of Athens was about 300,000 and of Sparta 250,000.
In Athens:
total 300,000
citizens 50,000
metics 20,000
slaves 90,000
women and children 140,000
Of course we don't know how accurate these numbers are.
"We are Macedonians but we are Slav Macedonians.That's who we are!We have no connection to Alexander the Greek and his Macedonia�Our ancestors came here in the 5th and 6th century" Kiro Gligorov FYROM
The 400,000 for slaves in 312 is generally
rejected as in all likelihood a text error. The number supposedly comes from a census
taken by Demetrious of Phaleron in 312 BC. One of the key problems is that like
similar recorded census taken in Rhodes and Megalopolis, it was likely for
military purposes, that is finding the number of males of military age (metric,
slave and citizen). The number 400,000 therefore suggests an astronomical number
of total slaves.Here is quote from the Athenian
Democracy in the age of Demosthenes by Mogens Herman Hansen about the 400,000
figure: What is more, it is impossible, and is quoted together with equally
impossible figures for other cities, such as 470,000 slaves on the island of
Aigina, which is only 85 sq. km in size and would have had to have a density of
5500 per sq km of slaves alone. See also AHM Jones absurd or A. W. Gromme,
who also dismisses the figure.The real
key issue is that three factors would likely dictate the slave population: the
general level of prosperity, the importance of Athens as a slave
market, and the relative activity of the attic silver mines. It seems unlikely
the slave population was much more than a tenth of the 400,000 figure in 312 given:
that Xenophon estimated the sliver mines could only employ about 10,000 slaves
at maximum; that in 312 BC that Athens was far poorer than in 323 or 338 (when
Hyperides estimated that there were 150,000 slaves); and that
with the final defeat in the Lamian war and Macedonian occupation, Rhodes was
fast overtaking Athens as the key trade and banking port in the Aegean
Hansen figures in 323-323 the total adult
male population at around 30,000 and a total population of around 100,000
Athenians (all ages and genders). Given the census of 312 suggest 10,000 adult
male metrics; he puts total metrics at 40,000.As for slaves he puts the number as fluctuating with prosperity probably
100,000 (or less) to 150,000.
Other historians working backward from the
amount of grain imported and grown in 4th century Attica, have put the maximum population
at around 250-300,000, which also tends to preclude the excessive slave figure.
A. W. Gomme for example, puts total population at no more than 250,000 275,000
(or lower) in the mid 4th century.With the same figures Jones comes up with about 125,000 for the total citizen
population around 350 BC, 20,000 -30,000 slaves and does not estimate metrics.
The figures given mainly for slaves were always at least questionable.
Here is an interesting read refering to ancient Greek demographics by Nathaniel Weyl.
The Greek population never compared in size with that of Persia or Egypt, and one of the astounding achievements of Greece is that so few should have done so much. Classical population estimates are, of course, subject to immense margins of error. Outside of China, the census was virtually unknown. The cumbersome number system of the Greeks made arithmetical computations difficult in the extreme. The fact that the Greek word *myrias*, meaning ten thousand, became *myriad* and came to mean any number so large that it could not be counted testified to Greek inability to estimate or manipulate large magnitudes easily.
With these qualifications, a few estimates of the population of the Creek cities can be offered. In 480 B.C., Corinth is believed to have had a population of 50,000 freemen and 60,000 slaves; a century later, the island of Aegina had 30,000 citizens and 470,000 slaves (according to Aristotle); in 431 B.C., Chios claimed 30,000 freemen and 100,000 slaves. Sybaris at the peak of its prosperity may have had 300,000 inhabitants. For Syracuse in Sicily, the population estimate is half a million.
Turning to Athens, the salt of Greece, there were 43,000 citizens in the age of Pericles, 28,500 metics (or resident aliens) and 115,000 slaves. The total population, including women and children, was about 315,000. Approximately a century and a half later, in 310 B.C., Demetrius of Phalerum took a census of the city and counted 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics and 400,000 slaves. Total population had more than doubled while the number of freemen had fallen by half. [1]
In Attica, soil erosion had disintegrated the traditional subsistence and diversified farming system as early as the beginning of the 4th century B.C. In the Critias, Plato attributes this process to "violent deluges which stripped off all the rich, soft soil," leaving "a country of skin and bones." Plato noted that the lofty, forested mountains had become so stripped of trees that many were fit only for the cultivation of bees; he added that aridity had set in, for the rainfall glided over the denuded surface, fell to the sea and was lost to agriculture. [2]
The Athenian response to this challenge was an agricultural revolution, based on specialization and production for export. The denuded hills now supported olive trees; the oil pressed from the olives was packed in jars and sent overseas in Attic ships and sold to foreigners by Attic merchants. "Bad harvests due to atmospheric conditions fall with crushing weight upon even the strongest land- powers," wrote an anonymous Athenian economist of the early fifth century B.C., "while sea-powers surmount them easily. Bad harvests are never of world-wide incidence, and therefore the masters of the sea are always able to draw upon regions in which the harvest has been abundant." [3] The anonymous Athenian saw that the wealth of Athens sprang from navigation and trade; her culture, her broad, cosmopolitan view and her exacting standards of aesthetic excellence were stimulated by the fact that her society was maritime and her wealth drawn from the ocean.
The demographic decline of Athens thus was not caused by soil erosion. The impoverishment of the land was, on the contrary, a stimulus, for it prevented Attica from sinking into the bovine, brutish stupidity of a peasant society and forced her to turn to navigation, seaborne trade, agricultural specialisation and the development of great handicraft industries for export.
The decline was caused, to a large extent, by the internecine military struggles between the city-states and by the fact that the citizens fought the wars of their cities instead of pursuing the perhaps wiser Roman policy of hiring barbarians for this purpose. It is generally assumed that the Roman policy was folly because some of the barbarians turned on their masters during the upheavals of the Voelkerwanderungen. Yet it is worth recalling that the Roman Empire in the West persisted for about five centuries and that in the East for 15. The political achievement of Rome, considered in terms of the organization of state power, rather than any actualization of individual freedom, is more impressive than that of Greece.
Depopulation in Greece seems to have been caused by institutional factors and by political and psychic decadence. Polybius describes the process cogently as it operated during the 2nd century B.C. In Boeotia, he observed, "the administration of justice in the country had remained in abeyance over a period of nearly twenty-five years"; civil and criminal law were systematically thwarted by the proclamation of states of siege and by arbitrary executive action; a welfare state was created by politicians who won votes by giving relief to the poor and releasing convicted debtors and criminals. "The effect of these measures was reinforced by another obsession of an unfortunate kind," Polybius added. "Persons dying childless began to abandon the habit which had formerly prevailed in Boeotia of bequeathing their property to their relatives in the next generation, and to spend it instead upon entertainment and drinking, in which they shared it with their friends. Even persons leaving families began, in many cases, to earmark the greater part of their property for legacies to the clubs, until there were many individuals in Boeotia entitled to more free dinners a month than there were days on which to eat them."
The same, or a similar, situation existed elsewhere in Greece. "In our own times," Polybius wrote, "the whole of Hellas has been afflicted with a low birth rate or, in other words, with depopulation, through which the states have been emptied of inhabitants with an accompanying fall of productivity -- and this in spite of the fact that we have not suffered from any continuous wars or epidemics.
"The fact is that the people of Hellas had entered upon the false path of ostentation, avarice, and laziness," the historian continued, "and were therefore becoming unwilling to marry or, if they did marry, to bring up the children born to them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two, [4] in order to leave them wealthy and to spoil them in their childhood; and in consequence of all this the evil had been spreading rapidly before it was observed. Where there are families of one or two children, of whom war claims one and disease the other for its victim, it is an evident and inevitable consequence that households should be left desolate and that states, precisely like beehives, should gradually lose their reserves and sink into impotence. On this subject there is no need whatsoever to inquire of the gods as to how we are to be saved from the cancer. The plain man will answer that, first and foremost, we must save ourselves, either by changing our obsession or alternately by making it illegal not to bring up every child that is born." [5]
[1] The figures for Athenian population in the Periclean age are from A. W. Gomme, The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B. C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 21, 26, 47; the other estimates were culled from a variety of sources by Will Durant, The Life of Greece ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939), PP. 91-95,150, 160-1, 173, 254-5, 561.
[2] Arnold J. Toynbee (trans.), in A Study of History, op. cit., I, 39.
[3] Toynbee, ibid., I, 41.
[4] This and the concluding sentence are references to infanticide, a practice which was legal in Greece.
[5] Polybius, Book XX, Chapter 6, 1-6 and Book VI, Chapter 7. Arnold J. Toynbee (trans.) in Creek Civilization and Character, op. cit., pp. 72-3.
A mathematician is a person who thinks that if there are supposed to be three people in a room, but five come out, then two more must enter the room in order for it to be empty.
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