Mortality Estimates from Roman Tombstone Inscriptions

Abstract

The distribution of age at death, inscribed on Roman tombstones is biased by underrepresentation of children's deaths, exaggeration of ages at death beyond age forty or fifty, and probably by understatement of younger women's ages at death. The inscriptions for males dying between the ages of fiften and forty-two provide the best basis for mortality estimates. On this basis, expectation of life at birth for the urban population of the western Roman Empire during the first and second centuries is estimated at between fifteen and twenty-five years. The expectation for the whole population of the Empire was probably about twenty-five or thirty years.

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