ABSTRACT
Rome was already a declining city when Diocletian came to the throne. It had never been a commercial or industrial town; its merchants, shopkeepers and craftsmen served only the local population. It had owed its importance to the fact that it was the administrative capital of the empire, and now it was no more important as a centre of government than Carthage or Arles. Yet it remained a huge city down to the fall of the empire in the west and indeed still under the Ostrogothic kingdom. There were still in the mid-fifth century, and it would seem even in the sixth, 120,000 persons who received the free ration of bread and pork, and as these were probably for the most part heads of families, the free plebeian population, including women and children, must have numbered four or five times that total. To these must be added a modest number of officials, lawyers, doctors and professors, and a more considerable body of clergy, the students at the university, the senatorial aristocracy, and finally the slaves who served the upper and middle classes. The total may well have exceeded two-thirds of a million inhabitants.
