ABSTRACT
Research in demography, like studies in economics or politics, is very much inclined to use history as a kind of charming and somewhat antiquated preamble to more serious, and, materially, more profitable considerations. The role of history in the study of current demographic problems results first of all from the fact that most of these problems appear basically in an historical form. The population of ancient Greece seems to have begun to decline in the third or the second century b.c., and a host of literary and epigraphic documents enable to point to some of the reasons. Depopulation in the Roman Empire begins to be apparent well before the second century a.d., and it is not impossible to discover the principal factors in this trend. From the tenth century onwards, the population of the Western Empire, rid of the Saracens, the Norsemen and the Magyars, began to increase ; many people were compelled to leave their family tenures.
