Daily life · Roman Empire Daily
At its peak, the city of Rome may have held around a million people, a size no European city matched again for centuries.
Deep dive
Fed by grain shipments and supplied by aqueducts, imperial Rome's population is commonly estimated near one million around the 1st–2nd century AD. After the empire's decline, the city shrank dramatically, and no European city reached that scale again until the early modern period.
Source: Population estimates in Hopkins, 'Conquerors and Slaves,' 1978; standard demographic surveys.
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