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Memento Mori
What the Romans Can Tell Us About Old Age and Death
Peter Jones
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Memento Mori
What the Romans Can Tell Us About Old Age and Death
Peter Jones
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About This Book
In this revealing and entertaining guide to how the Romans confronted their own mortality, Peter Jones shows us that all the problems associated with old age and death that so transfix us today were already dealt with by our ancient ancestors two thousand years ago.Romans inhabited a world where man, knowing nothing about hygiene let alone disease, had no defences against nature. Death was everywhere. Half of all Roman children were dead by the age of five. Only eight per cent of the population made it over sixty. One bizarre result was that half the population consisted of teenagers. From the elites' philosophical take on the brevity of life to the epitaphs left by butchers, bakers and buffoons, Memento Mori ('Remember you die') shows how the Romans faced up to this world and attempted to take the sting out of death.
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Chapter One
LIFESPAN
HOW LONG DID ROMANS LIVE?
The ‘ancient world’ in this book will cover the period from c. 700 BC, when the West’s first literature appeared in Greece, to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, i.e. roughly AD 500. During that time we have examples of people living to over 100. That is entirely possible. What is much more difficult to decide is the normal life expectation across the whole population.
Below are given the UK statistics for 2015. Those are the sorts of figures we would love to have for the ancient world. But though Romans did take censuses of male citizens and their property every five years, they appear only patchily in our sources.
Then again, about 100,000 tomb inscriptions (epitaphs) survive. These are extremely interesting for all sorts of reasons, recording everyone from consuls to slaves to professional buffoons. But they are unreliable for census purposes, because they are too selective, being dominated by adult males. The same is true of written records – as will become clear.
UK STATISTICS
Our ‘census’ is taken over from Latin census, ‘registration’. In Rome, this information was used to classify male citizens for class, military and tax purposes.
In the United Kingdom the Office for National Statistics produces an annual population count. In 2015, out of a population of 65.1 million:
• 1.5 million were above 85 (2.3 per cent)
• 11.6 million were over 65 (17.8 per cent)
• 23.6 million were over 50 (36.2 per cent)
• There are now more people in the UK over 65 than there are under 18
• Half a million were over 90 (70 per cent of them women)
• The life expectancy at birth for females is 82.8, and for males 79.1
• A girl born in 2011 has a 1 in 3 chance, a boy a 1 in 4 chance, of living to 100
• The median age is now 40, the highest it has ever been ‘Median age’ is not the average age: it means the age at which half the population is younger, half older.
The latest figures for 2016 show a small increase on all these figures: for example, total population 65.6 million, over-85s 2.4 per cent, and so on.
ROMAN TOMBSTONES: AN IMPOSSIBLE PICTURE
The Roman Empire at its height numbered perhaps 60 million; the total of lives over the c. 500 years during which the Empire survived, far more. From this period we have recovered c. 100,000 funerary inscriptions from across the Roman world. This looks like vital evidence for demographic purposes, i.e. describing the size, structure and distribution of the population. But for that purpose it is, in fact, largely useless.
DODGY STATS
There are 10,697 epitaphs from Roman North Africa. These yield the following statistics:
26.5 per cent (2,835) lived to 70 or over;
2.96 per cent (313) to 100 or over; and
0.25 per cent (27) to 120 or over.
Now look at the UK statistics. It seems unlikely that (given diet, disease, medical understanding, etc.) Roman North Africa’s ancient population could have so easily outlived today’s UK population.
DODGIER STATS
In one region of North Africa tombstone data from 1,258 individuals would suggest that:
The average life expectancy was 60.2;
39.3 per cent (494 people) were over 70; but only
0.5 per cent (6) were under 10!
This is obviously absurd and confirms the point about the unreliability of epitaphs as evidence for age statistics. The fact is that tombstones marked the death of someone precious. So they could not add up to a serious record of a whole society’s age range or life expectancy. If they told one anything, it would be about why the deceased was important to the family or friends who paid for the monument to be put up.
Finally, when one does collate the information from all of them and try to draw demographic conclusions, the result describes a society the like of which has never existed anywhere at any time: a high preponderance of males over females, and very few babies (calculations vary from 0.4 per cent to 1.3 per cent!).
WRITTEN RECORDS
Pliny the Elder’s 37-volume encyclopedia (Natural History) of the Roman world survives complete. One section was devoted to human longevity. Apart from the obviously mythical or transparently dodgy, he mentioned a few over-100s: a man who lived to 108, and a woman to 115 (she also bore 15 children). The actress Galeria Copiola appeared on stage aged 104 to celebrate Augustus’ recovery from illness in AD 8. Nothing wrong with that: it is entirely feasible that very rare individuals did live to such an advanced age.
DODGIER WRITTEN RECORDS
Pliny quoted a census from AD 74. One might expect serious information from such a source. But using the census from one region of Italy, Pliny reported that:
81 people survived into their 100s, including
4 up to 135 or 137; and
3 up to 140.
This strains credulity somewhat. The reason may possibly be that all the people quoted were born before Augustus introduced a system of birth registration, set up in AD 4 and AD 9. How, therefore, the census could have been certain of their birth dates is not clear.
ROMAN LIFE EXPECTANCY
Epitaphs and written records do not give us any demographic help. What, then, can we do? Make a best guess is the answer, with the help of reliable life statistics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These life statistics, gathered from very different cultures all over the world, are used by insurance companies to work out the likelihood of this sort of person with this sort of lifestyle at this age (etc.) living for – how much longer? Scholars proceed as follows:
First, the birth and death rate of any ancient population we know about must have been of such a sort as to create a stable society. That means enough children survived for long enough to have children themselves. If that was not the case, the society would have died out.
Second, scholars make a guess at the average age expectancy of the population: in this case, our guess is about twenty-five years. Why? Because lower than twenty and the society would have died out; but to get it above thirty, the ancients would need to have had a far better understanding of illness, hygiene, diet (etc.) than they did (see p. 66). Further, the evidence from the written record as a whole – including, for example, tax records, legal texts, censuses and so on – does not make it wildly unlikely that an average life expectancy of about twenty-five years is wrong.
So, making those assumptions, scholars ask the question: what would be the life expectancy of a stable society whose average age was twenty-five?
WORLD RECORDS
Coale-Demeny life tables were constructed in 1966 by the Americans Ansley Coale and Paul Demeny. They were...