Measuring quality of life among Ancient Roman Populations

Center for Historical Research at The Ohio State University 2011-2012: Health, Disease, and Environment in World History presents: Kim Bowes (University of Pennsylvania) Measuring quality of life among Ancient Roman Populations December 2, 2011 This talk will focus the problems of applying data from the ancient world to modern metrics for quality of life, and offer some solutions, looking particularly data on the rural poor. The Roman rural poor are typically assumed to have had very low quality of life by any number of indeces, particularly climatic and agricultural factors that lead to a precarious subsistence living, low life expectancy, and only very distant ties to a market economy which limited income. Our new data a far more complex situation with multiple contradictory indicators. Comment: Nathan Rosenstein, Dept. of History, Ohio State