For centuries after the Middle Ages classical antiquity was a civilization to envy and admire. Not surprisingly this faded with the Industrial Revolution, when modern society began to make a clear break with the past. That loss of admiration is reflected in twentieth century histories of antiquity, where the otherness and underdevelopment of antiquity were now increasingly emphasized. Research focussed on potential social and cultural explanations of ancient economic failure, and largely avoided to document actual economic performance, probably because at the time no one could imagine how this was to be done, in the absence of sufficient documentary sources of the kind available for later periods of history.
In these four lectures I will try to show that, largely thanks to the tremendous growth of archaeological information during recent decades, we are now in a position to reassess Roman economic performance directly. There are now plenty of data, and the challenge is to use them imaginatively. And unlike in the past, when data were few and far between, this new challenge involves dealing with an embarrassment of riches: we need to find methodologies to aggregate these data if we want to write big history in an empirical way: where indeed in world history does classical antiquity stand, and ancient Rome in particular?
The biggest story in world history is that of the growth of human number. Here, the Roman Empire occupies a special place, as an empire of unprecedented population size for its time, and high population density. Thus far, however, such reconstructions of Roman population trends are largely based on limited and problematic written data. I will argue that modern archaeology offers far better tools to reconstruct population, and population trends in particular. Archaeology is beginning to show that in many regions population grew spectacularly, to decline similarly dramatically in late antiquity.