The Population of Rome

While the word metropolis originally referred to ancient Greek cities, it can be said with some degree of certainty that Rome was the world’s first great metropolis. In fact, when Rome became an empire under the first emperor, Augustus, the city had a population of one to two million people. That figure was not surpassed until the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

As incredible as it sounds, Rome remained the largest city on the planet for over eighteen hundred years. How did it achieve such incredible demographic figures centuries before the rise of major cities? The answer is fairly simple: Rome was undoubtedly the centre of the western world and everyone wanted to be there.

Not only did Rome offer better opportunities for families and foreigners, but it was also the playground of the rich and powerful and the locus of politics and business. But after a series of incompetent and corrupt emperors and the loss of several overseas colonies, Rome gradually began to lose prestige and its population subsequently declined. The upper class also lost many of their own estates in areas on the outskirts of the city that today support Rome vacation rentals .

By the third century AD, the Eternal City had lost nearly ninety per cent of its population, which still made it one of the largest cities in the world with 150,000 residents. The only problem was that the city no longer had the manpower to forestall a full scale invasion by the barbarians, the Visigoths.

When Rome was sacked in 410 A.D it had a population of only 50,000 souls. It would take more than fifteen hundred years before the city once again became a metropolis. And even after Italian unification in 1870, the city could only claim 200,000 residents. It was not until well after the Second World War that the Eternal City had as many citizens as it did over nineteen centuries before.

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