[71] Diogenes Laertius (in vita Empedoclis) says that Agrigentum contained only 800,000 inhabitants.
[72] The country that supplied this number was not above a third of Italy—viz., the Pope’s dominions, Tuscany, and a part of the kingdom of Naples; but perhaps in those early times there were very few slaves except in Rome, or the great cities.
[73] Plutarch (in vita Cæs.) makes the number that Cæsar fought with amount only to three millions; Julian (in Cæsaribus) to two.
[74] Argos seems also to have been a great city, for Lysias contents himself with saying that it did not exceed Athens. (Orat. 34.)
[75] Orat. contra Verem, lib. 4, cap. 52. Strabo, lib. 6, says it was twenty-two miles in compass; but then we are to consider that it contained two harbours within it, one of which was a very large one, and might be regarded as a kind of bay.
[76] Demosthenes assigns 20,000.
[77] Lib. 2. Diodorus Siculus’s account perfectly agrees (lib. 12).
[78] We are to observe that when Dionysius Halicarnassæus says that if we regard the ancient walls of Rome the extent of the city will not appear greater than that of Athens, he must mean the Acropolis and high town only. No ancient author ever speaks of the Pyræum, Phalerus, and Munychia as the same with Athens; much less can it be supposed that Dionysius would consider the matter in that light after the walls of Cimon and Pericles were destroyed and Athens was entirely separated from these other towns. This observation destroys all Vossius’s reasonings and introduces common sense into these calculations.
[79] The same author affirms that Corinth had once 460,000 slaves, Ægina 470,000; but the foregoing arguments hold stronger against these facts, which are indeed entirely absurd and impossible. It is however remarkable that Athenæus cites so great an authority as Aristotle for this last fact; and the scholiast on Pindar mentions the same number of slaves in Ægina.
[80] Demost. contra Lept. The Athenians brought yearly from Pontus 400,000 medimni or bushels of corn, as appeared from the custom-house books; and this was the greatest part of their importation. This, by the by, is a strong proof that there is some great mistake in the foregoing passage of Athenæus, for Attica itself was so barren in corn that it produced not enough even to maintain the peasants. Tit. Liv., lib. 43; cap. 6, Lucian, in his navigium sive vota, says that a ship, which by the dimensions he gives seems to have been about the size of our third rates, carried as much corn as would maintain all Attica for a twelvemonth. But perhaps Athens was decayed at that time, and besides it is not safe to trust such loose rhetorical calculations.