Poverty and Demography: The Case of the Gracchan Land Reforms

de Ligt

99 citations0/0 files storedMnemosyne

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Classical Antiquity Studies Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History Historical and Literary Studies

Abstract

Abstract According to many ancient historians the second century BC witnessed a fast expansion of slave-staffed estates that pushed large numbers of free peasants off the land. The widespread rural impoverishment caused by this development is thought to have resulted in population decline and a shortage of military recruits. Against this view this paper argues that not only the number of Roman citizens but the free population of Italy as a whole continued to grow during the decades preceding the Gracchan land reforms. This means that Tiberius Gracchus was correct in assuming that the number of impoverished citizens was steadily increasing but wrong to interpret the census figures of the 140s and 130s BC as indicating that the citizen body had begun to shrink. In short, the widespread rural misery lying behind the Gracchan reforms should be seen as a consequence of continuing population growth rather than as a cause of demographic decline.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 99 citations exist upstream.

References

1983Theory of Fertility Decline.1997English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 1994The Demography of Roman Egypt 1996Metropolis and Hinterland 1977The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies 1969Roman colonization under the Republic 1994The Size of the Roman Population: Beloch and the Meaning of the Augustan Census Figures 1987The age of Roman Girls at Marriage: Some Reconsiderations

Cited by

2007The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World 2007Demography 2007The Early Roman Empire: Consumption 2007The Early Roman Empire: The State and the Economy 2007The Early Roman Empire: Distribution 2012The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy 2007Law and Economic Institutions

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.