How many people lived in the Roman Empire at its peak?

Question

Cifra · Accepted Answer

60,000,000 people. Historians estimate 60 to 70 million people under Roman rule around 150 CE — somewhere near a fifth of everyone alive at the time. The city of Rome itself is thought to have passed a million residents, a level no European city reached again until London in the 1800s. Apply a share of world population. The explanation gives it as roughly a fifth of everyone alive at the time, and world population around 150 CE was somewhere near three hundred million. A fifth of that gives sixty million directly, and reasoning through shares is far more tractable than estimating an ancient absolute. That share is the genuinely remarkable fact rather than the total. A single political entity containing a fifth of the human species is a level of concentration that only a handful of states in history have reached, and it explains why Roman administrative decisions echo through European institutions two thousand years later. The city figure from this site's companion question is the other half of the picture: one city holding well over one percent of the empire's entire population. Pre-industrial states were overwhelmingly rural, so a capital of that relative size was an extraordinary concentration that required the whole empire's logistics to sustain.

Source	Scheidel, Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World
Figure refers to	2007
Last checked	September 1, 2026
Unit	people

How many people lived in the Roman Empire at its peak?

The answer

How to get close to this number

Where this number comes from

Think you can do better?

Related questions