SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

A reasonable estimate is that across the empire at any one time there were fewer than 200 elite Roman administrators, plus maybe a few thousand slaves of the emperor, who had been sent out from the imperial centre to govern an empire of more than 50 million people.

The other answer to how the Romans managed is that the local populations played a big part in running the empire, through the towns and cities across the Roman world that Rome either supported or founded.

The provincial – or ‘native’ – elites living in these towns acted as the crucial middlemen between the Roman governor, with his tiny staff, and the provincial population at large.

the work of just one of these writers – Plutarch, the second-century CE biographer, philosopher, essayist and priest of the famous Greek oracle at Delphi – extends to as many modern pages as all the surviving work of the fifth century BCE put together, from the tragedies of Aeschylus to the history of Thucydides.

Despite its appearance, this is not a natural hill at all but the remains of a man-made Roman rubbish dump, the broken fragments of 53 million containers of olive oil, pottery amphorae with a capacity of about 60 litres each. These had almost all been imported from southern Spain over a hundred years or so, from the mid second to the mid third century CE, and had been dumped as soon as the oil was decanted.

The best estimate is that by 200 CE there were around 200,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, of between 50 and 60 million people,