3

I wonder what's the best recent scholarly estimate of the percentages of each of the 3 main social classes of population in the city of Rome around the time of Octavian:

  • Patricians
  • Plebeians
  • Slaves

It would be a bonus if in addition the answer includes:

  • comparison with the percentages outside the cities
  • some statistics on the subdivisions of the Plebeians:
    • military
    • freed slaves
    • tradesmen
    • skilled workers like scribes, musicians
    • etc.
  • some statistics on the slaves:
    • numbers who became slaves due to conquest
    • numbers of Plebeians who became slaves to avoid hunger, to obtain protection, or due to bankruptcy
    • numbers who were freed due to beneficence of their masters

Scholarly references to journal articles, books, etc. would be a plus.

Improve this question
3
  • 4
    Keep in mind that we know much less than we'd like to know about things like Roman population statistics -- there isn't even agreement as to the population of Rome within +/- 50%. Second, there was a huge class of freedmen who fell between slave and free in law, though their children were free. Third, the Patrician/Plebeian distinction was mostly a matter of bragging rights by the time the Civil Wars ended. (For one thing, the old Patrician families had been severely culled by those civil wars.) The more important social class distinction was Senatorial/Equestrian/Free/Freedman/Slave. Commented 11 hours ago
  • 2
    @MarkOlson I'm new to History.SE but I have been around SE for a while. So I welcome input to make the question more valuable. Feel free to edit the major social classes by the time the Roman Republic/Empire was around Octavian, and I'll be a happy camper. For demographics question, should I rephrase the Q in terms of 5 classes then? Commented 10 hours ago
  • I'm not sure how to modify the question so that it still resembles what you wrote but is also reasonably answerable. I recently read Paul Erdkamp's The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome which had a chapter on estimating the population of Rome and the number of slaves in Rome. (Bottom line: it's a mess.) Estimating other segments of society is likely to be harder. While the Romans kept excellent records, they were not judged worth the huge cost of making new copies every century or so (the only way most things survived), so virtually nothing remains. Commented 7 hours ago

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

As Wikipedia makes clear, we don't know enough to answer this with any real precision. It's safe to say that the senatorial elite was almost negligible as a percentage of the population and that plebians were a solid majority. Harris (1999) cites a few sources suggesting the slave population was something like 10% but without much confidence.

Improve this answer
0

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.