The city of Rome was by far the largest city in the Roman world. By the end of the first century BCE, it had a population of about one miliion people. It was as large as London in 1800, when London was the largest city in the world. Rome could be so large, because it was the capital not just of Italy (population c. 7 million) but of a Mediterranean empire. Rome’s population had grown rapidly by more than six times from an estimated 150,000 in 225 BCE.19 The capital's growth was fed by three streams of immigrants: free citizen and allied rural emigrants from Italy (small peasant families were displaced by fewer slaves working on larger farms); the forced and continual immigration of particularly adult male slaves as victims of Rome's conquest of the Mediterranean basin in the last two centuries BCE; free craftsmen and traders, particularly from coastal towns in the Mediterranean.20 The city of Rome grew and its huge size was maintained only by a steady stream of immigrants.
Rome could be so large, partly because the Roman state (from 58 BC) continually subvented and guaranteed (with occasional glitches) a basic supply of wheat to its registered free citizen population. The reported number of recipients varied, but in the reign of Augustus seems to have stabilized at around 200 – 250,000 adult males. Each received 33kg wheat (5 modii of 6.55kg) per month, which was more than enough for one adult (if he did not live on bread alone), but not enough for a family. In the fourth century, state hand-outs were supplemented by rations of wine and pork.
The state supply of free wheat to a fixed number of adult male citizens had significant political, economic and demographic implications. Free distributions symbolized citizens’ right to benefit collectively from the fruits of conquest. Romans were now the chosen people. The first emperor Augustus reportedly wondered whether to abolish the wheat dole, but wisely decided against it, allegedly on the grounds that the issue might become a political football, and others might seek or gain kudos from the dole’s restoration. Augustus’ successor Tiberius preserved the dole but abolished the people’s participation in elections. Citizens at Rome had become state pensioners, bribed into quiescent dependence by bread and circuses. The emperors' generosity underwrote their continued popularity.22 Rome was after all the main stage on which emperors acted their role as rulers of the world.
Economically, the exaction, storage, transport and distribution of 100,000 tonnes of wheat per year to Rome was a sizeable task. The wheat came primarily from Sicily, north Africa and Egypt. The volume itself was not the problem, though at peak periods Rome's port at Ostia and the short stretch of the Tiber (21 km) along which barges were hauled, must have been jammed. Egypt alone yielded in wheat tax more than the city of Rome and the frontier armies needed together. It was more a problem of organization, consistency of supply, and price. On the private market (since state supplies had to be supplemented) wheat prices in Rome were four times higher than they were in Egypt, and 2-3 times as high as they were in Sicily and the rest of Italy. The city of Rome stood at the peak of a pyramid of rising prices. The total cost of supplying state wheat to Rome amounted to over 15% of state revenues (100,000 tonnes at 9 HS per modius = 135 million HS). But the supply of free wheat to citizens at Rome presumably also helped the labour force buy wine and oil produced on the estates of the rich, and/or held down the price of labour in the capital. The free wheat dole subsidised the rich as well as the poor.
Demographically, the attractions of the free wheat dole and the huge consumer market which Rome constituted, must have helped stimulate a continuous flow of immigrants to the city of Rome. In outsiders' imagination, the streets of Rome were paved with gold. For the Christian writer of Revelation, Rome was a scarlet harlot adorned with gold and jewels, sitting astride its seven hills, sucking the blood of countless nations, and drinking from a golden cup full of abominations and the impurites of fornication; Rome was the 'great city that holds sway over the kings of the earth'. In a Jewish writer's imagination, Rome had 365 streets, in each street there were 365 palaces; each palace had 365 stories, and each storey contained enough food to feed the whole world (B. Talmud, Pesahim 118b). Rome with its huge baths, its temple roofs glistening with gilded bronze, beckoned as a city of opportunity even to those who little chance of ever going there.
But in pre-industrial societies, larger cities have higher death rates than smaller cities, and smaller cities have higher death rates than the surrounding countryside. The city of Rome was a death-trap, which sucked people in and killed them off with infectious diseases. Even the baths, which cleansed the relatively prosperous may have helped concentrate diseases (like mdern hospitals); Roman doctors recommended baths for people suffering from malaria, cholera, dysentery, infestation by worms, diarrhoea, and gonorhoea , and the emperor Hadrian allowed the sick to use baths in the morning before the healthy.
So Rome could maintain its huge population only by constant influx of immigrants, both from its Italian hinterland and from overseas. If death rates in Rome were only 10 per thousand higher in Rome than in the rest of Italy, and Wrigley (1967:46) thinks that in London in the eighteenth century, the difference was significantly greater than that, then Rome with a population of one million people, needed 10,000 migrants a year. If the difference in mortality between metropolis and countryside was 15 per thousand, then just to maintain its population, Rome needed 15,0000 fresh migrants per year. Immigration to Rome was on twice the scale as migration to the army. It must have prevented any natural increase in Italian population, and/or contributed like military recruitment to Italy’s depopulation. On the other hand, migration had a triply beneficial impact. It allowed an effective increase in agricultural productivity (fewer remaining peasants could work more land); it provided migrants who were lucky enough to return to their home town or village an image of metropolitan life-styles (classy pots and silk underwear); and it either increased or maintained the market for agricultural and manufactured (hand-made) exports.
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