This brief survey considers three pieces of demographic evidence from the Roman world. They consist of a register of town councillors, an actuarial table from a Roman lawyer and a body of age-statements from tombstone inscriptions and papyri.

The album of Canusium

The complete list of the town council at Canusium in southern Italy as it stood in AD 223 is both a source for Roman municipal history of almost unique value, and a potential source of demographic information.

The key to any demographic interpretation is the age at which office–holding began. The inscription lists a standard Roman town–council of 100 members, of whom 68 had held at least one magistracy. Its contents allow two possible reconstructions. The standard legal age for entry to the town council and to the junior magistracies was 25. In a society where life–expectancy was far below modern western levels, the legal age–threshold was quite likely to function in practice as both minimum and maximum. The pressures were if anything for age–thresholds to be lower: when tombstones break their customary silence about the age of magistrates, it is often to reveal a case in which office was held below the legal minimum age.

Town magistracies were normally held in parallel by two colleagues, like the original consulships of Rome.