Diodorus Siculus makes the same enumeration amount to near a million. These variations are suspicious. He plainly, too, supposes that Italy in his time was not so populous, another very suspicious circumstance; for who can believe that the inhabitants of that country diminished from the time of the first Punic War to that of the Triumvirates?
Julius Cæsar, according to Appian, encountered four millions of Gauls, killed one million, and took another million prisoners.[73] Supposing the number of the enemy’s army and of the killed could be exactly assigned, which never is possible, how could it be known how often the same man returned into the armies, or how distinguish the new from the old levied soldiers? No attention ought ever to be given to such loose, exaggerated calculations; especially where the author tells us not the mediums upon which the calculations were founded.
Paterculus makes the number killed by Cæsar amount only to 400,000: a much more probable account, and more easily reconciled to the history of these wars given by that conqueror himself in his Commentaries.
One would imagine that every circumstance of the life and actions of Dionysius the elder might be regarded as authentic and free from all fabulous exaggeration, both {p146} because he lived at a time when letters flourished most in Greece and because his chief historian was Philistus, a man allowed to be of great genius, and who was a courtier and minister of that prince. But can we admit that he had a standing army of 100,000 foot, 10,000 horse, and a fleet of 400 galleys? These, we may observe, were mercenary forces, and subsisted upon their pay, like our armies in Europe. For the citizens were all disarmed; and when Dion afterwards invaded Sicily and called on his countrymen to vindicate their liberty, he was obliged to bring arms along with him, which he distributed among those who joined him. In a state where agriculture alone flourishes there may be many inhabitants, and if these be all armed and disciplined, a great force may be called out upon occasion; but great numbers of mercenary troops can never be maintained without either trade and manufactures, or very extensive dominions. The United Provinces never were masters of such a force by sea and land as that which is said to belong to Dionysius; yet they possess as large a territory, perfectly well cultivated, and have infinitely more resources from their commerce and industry. Diodorus Siculus allows that, even in his time, the army of Dionysius appeared incredible; that is, as I interpret it, it was entirely a fiction, and the opinion arose from the exaggerated flattery of the courtiers, and perhaps from the vanity and policy of the tyrant himself.
It is a very usual fallacy to consider all the ages of antiquity as one period, and to compute the numbers contained in the great cities mentioned by ancient authors as if these cities had been all contemporary. The Greek colonies flourished extremely in Sicily during the age of Alexander; but in Augustus’s time they were so decayed that almost all the product of that fertile island was consumed in Italy.
Let us now examine the numbers of inhabitants assigned to particular cities in antiquity, and omitting the numbers of Nineveh, Babylon, and the Egyptian Thebes, let us confine ourselves to the sphere of real history, to the {p147} Grecian and Roman states. I must own, the more I consider this subject the more am I inclined to scepticism with regard to the great populousness ascribed to ancient times.
Athens is said by Plato to be a very great city; and it was surely the greatest of all the Greek[74] cities, except Syracuse, which was nearly about the same size in Thucydides’ time, and afterwards increased beyond it; for Cicero[75] mentions it as the greatest of all the Greek cities in his time, not comprehending, I suppose, either Antioch or Alexandria under that denomination. Athenæus says that, by the enumeration of Demetrius Phalereus, there were in Athens 21,000 citizens, 10,000 strangers, and 400,000 slaves. This number is very much insisted on by those whose opinion I call in question, and is esteemed a fundamental fact to their purpose; but, in my opinion, there is no point of criticism more certain than that Athenæus and Ctesicles, whom he cites, are here mistaken, and that the number of slaves is augmented by a whole cypher, and ought not to be regarded as more than 40,000.
Firstly, when the number of citizens is said to be 21,000 by Athenæus,[76] men of full age are only understood. For (1) Herodotus says that Aristagoras, ambassador from the Ionians, found it harder to deceive one Spartan than 30,000 Athenians, meaning in a loose way the whole state, supposed to be met in one popular assembly, excluding the women and children. (2) Thucydides says that, making allowance for all the absentees in the fleet, army, garrisons, and for people employed in their private affairs, the Athenian Assembly never rose to five thousand. (3) The forces enumerated by the same historian,[77] being all citizens, and amounting to 13,000 heavy-armed infantry, prove the {p148} same method of calculation, as also the whole tenor of the Greek historians, who always understand men of full age when they assign the number of citizens in any republic. Now, these being but the fourth of the inhabitants, the free Athenians were by this account 84,000, the strangers 40,000, and the slaves, calculating by the smaller number, and allowing that they married and propagated at the same rate with freemen, were 160,000, and the whole inhabitants 284,000—a large enough number surely. The other number, 1,720,000, makes Athens larger than London and Paris united.
Secondly, there were but 10,000 houses in Athens.
Thirdly, though the extent of the walls, as given us by Thucydides, be great (viz., eighteen miles, beside the sea-coast), yet Xenophon says there was much waste ground within the walls. They seemed indeed to have joined four distinct and separate cities.[78]