Thanks for the clarification, Conon.
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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