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Fertility control in the classical world: Was there an ancient fertility transition?

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Abstract

Classical literary sources, tombstone inscriptions and skeletal remains have been used by classicists to show that there was probably a decline in the population of the Roman Empire caused by the deliberate control of family numbers through contraception, infanticide and child exposure. This finding is important as it appears to demonstrate that the fertility transition associated with the modern Industrial Revolution is not unique and may have had predecessors. Although few new classical demographic data have become available, there has been a vast increase in interest in classical demography, reflecting the late twentieth-century focus on population change, especially fertility control, and the associated development of demographic analytical techniques and models. This new classical demography has largely strengthened previous findings on mortality and marriage, but it has suggested that the Roman Empire's population was near-stationary, rather than declining, and exhibited natural fertility. Nevertheless, the literary tradition may be correct in suggesting that the elite faced great problems in preventing the family patrimony from being dispersed by partible inheritance and so resorted to restricting their legitimate family size, largely by child exposure. The parallel may not be the modern fertility transition but the lower sectional fertility achieved by thebourgeoisie of Geneva in the eighteenth century.

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  1. Demography and Sociology Program, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, 0200, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    John C. Caldwell

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Caldwell, J.C. Fertility control in the classical world: Was there an ancient fertility transition?. Journal of Population Research 21, 1–17 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03032208

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