MARRIED AT 50 YEARS OF Age. V, 1, 1796, lived 80 y. 4 m. 8 d., married 30 y.

Ad Tricesimum.

Friedlaender at the end of his collection of inscriptions says (page 569): "Es ist kein Grund anzunehmen, dass eine grosse Vermehrung dieser Sammlung wesentlich andere Altersverhaeltnisse ergeben wuerde." This statement is disproved by the fact that the mean age at marriage derived from the citations of Friedlaender is about 16, or two years less than that obtained from my list of ages at marriage. As his own list shows an average age at marriage considerably above 14, that period which he definitely states to be the average age at marriage (page 565), he attempts to obviate this difficulty by two unwarranted assumptions. He says (page 569): "Von den im Alter von mehr als 18 Jahren verheiratheten Frauen ist ohne Zweifel ein grosser, wenn nicht der groesste Teil schon frueher verheirathet gewesen." There seems to be no evidence to justify this statement; in fact, direct evidence to the contrary may be found in the inscriptions. I have collected 384 inscriptions of the city of Rome which give the length of married life. The average length of married life as obtained from these is about 24 years, nearly the same as the average of modern times. Though there may have been a tendency to record cases of long married life, still the figures incline us to the belief that marriage in Rome, considering the population as a whole and not simply the upper classes, to which the literature of the times almost exclusively relates, was not of that unstable character which the writings of such authors as Juvenal would lead us to assume and which Friedlaender appears to have had before his mind.

Friedlaender's second assumption is as follows (page 569): "Auch ist zu bedenken, dass diese Frauen groessten theils den mittlern und untern Staenden angehoeren, in denen Armuth, der Mangel einer Mitgift u. s. w. noch leichter die Verheirathung verzoegern konnte, als in den hoehern; in diesen wird also um so mehr Verheirathung bald noch vollendetem zwoelfsten Jahr fuer das Gewoehnliche zu halten sein.” This is directly opposed to all that modern statistics teach us with regard to the mean marrying age in the different classes of society. (Mayo-Smith, Statistics and Sociology, 103 ff.) There is no reason to suppose that the law which prevails in modern society does not hold good for ancient times. As the poor in Rome were largely maintained at the expense of the state, there would be an added cause for the early marriage of the lower classes in the metropolis.

I should not be inclined to place the average age at marriage of women as early as 18 years of age, though this is the average obtained from the list of ages cited above. There is a marked tendency on the part of the Romans in composing epitaphs to record the age at death, the age at marriage, and the length of married life, when these are in some degree exceptional. This fact, which is an important one to bear in mind in drawing inferences from the figures presented by the epitaphs, has apparently always been overlooked. The tables of the ages at death which follow, clearly show that deaths between the ages of 45 and 60, or the period of "senectas," are not recorded in like proportion as those occurring at other periods of life. The same tendency may be noted in the records of the length of married life. The 290 epitaphs of the city of Rome, which merely record the length of married life but do not mention the age at marriage nor the age at death, give as the average length of married life 26 years, whereas the 94 of the city of Rome which give the age of marriage directly, or indirectly by stating the length of married life and the age at death, give an average of only 17 years. It is not probable that this is mere accident, but that when the length of married life alone was given there was a tendency to record cases above the normal length.

A tendency to record early marriages may also be observed. This is especially apparent when the age of the girl at marriage is definitely given, as in VI, 3, 20370, and VI, 2, 10867, and also in cases in which the youth of the girls is emphasized by such expressions as "a prima aetate" (XIV, 963) even in connection with the statement of the age at death and the length of married life, and "ab infantia" (VI, 3, 15488).

My conclusion that the average age of women at marriage is far from being so low as is usually maintained is further strengthened by considering the average age of men at marriage as far as this may be ascertained from the inscriptions. Here I find, instead of an average of 17 years, as is often given, an average of 26. This figure seems to me to represent more nearly the average age of men at marriage in ancient Rome than the average which we obtain for women from the records of the inscriptions, for the reason that there is not the same tendency to record early marriages in the case of men as we noted in the case of women. The absence of this motive to mention the age of men at the time of marriage would account in part for the fact that their age at marriage is not so frequently mentioned as that of women.

II. Age at Death.

There seems to be a general impression among students of Roman life that from the records of the inscriptions we may form some idea of the average length of human life in the ancient Roman Empire. Nissen, in his admirable work “Italische Landeskunde," says (page 411): "Die Sammlung der stadtroemischen Inschriften wird einen nuechternen ziffermaessigen Commentar gewahren zu den Schilderungen der socialen Zustaende, die wir in der Litteratur lesen. mittlere Lebensdauer erscheint ueberaus kurz, Kindersegen in heutigen Sinne unerhoert." Professor Zimmermann, in an article entitled "Der kulturgeschichtliche Wert der roemischen Inschriften," has arrived at conclusions directly opposed to those of Nissen in respect to the length of life in ancient times. He has compared the percentage of those who are

given in C. I. L, II, as dying at the age of 70 or over, with that of those who died in Posen in the year 1884 at a corresponding age. He says (page 20): "Das Ergebniss dieser Vergleichung war, dass der Prozentsatz der siebenzig und mehrere Jahre alt Gewordenen im damaligen Spanien 11 betrug, waerend der fuer 'Posen' nur 9 hoch war. Bedenkt man nun noch, um wie viel geringer damals die persoenliche Sicherheit war . . . so wird man daraus doch vielleicht auch den Schluss ziehen koennen, dass die Leute damals im Verhaeltnisse ebenso alt geworden, wie heute." This he uses as the basis of the following important conclusion: "Steht aber Sittlichkeit und langes Leben irgendwie in Wechselwirkung, so konnten auch die Menschen jener Zeit so schlecht nicht gewesen sein."

Neither of these writers has tabulated the facts to which they refer, nor has any one else before performed this work. Indeed, the task was impossible before the publication of the C. I. L. Previously Latin inscriptions were scattered throughout three or four thousand volumes. The majority of the texts were produced without critical spirit, and a large number of false inscriptions (about one-tenth of the whole number) were included with the genuine.

It has seemed to me that a tabulation of these statistics would be useful and would present the facts clearly to the eye, and scholars would no longer be left to draw impressions from a general reading which could not be trusted to give any accurate idea where so many thousand cases are concerned. This will at least help us to ascertain whether these figures are capable of showing what the average length of life was in ancient times as compared with modern times.

These statistics are derived chiefly from the sepulcralia, which form more than half in number of the inscriptions of the C. I. L. and more than two-thirds of the inscriptions of the city of Rome.

I have tabulated all the ages contained in the C. I. L. as far as published. I have included the Christian inscriptions as well as the Pagan, for the reason that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish them. The Christians were subject

to the same general conditions of life as the Pagans, and if a greater purity of morals tended to lengthen their lives the number of Christian inscriptions included in the corpus is so small that the general results are not materially affected by them.

Very doubtful cases have been omitted; for example, if the inscription contained an X with the part before or after it broken, so that the age might have been anywhere from 9 to 90, it has been omitted from the account; whereas if the inscription showed LX, for example, with a break after it, though the age might have been 90 or upwards, it has been counted as 60; but these cases again are so few that they will not materially affect the results.1 There are also a very few cases which are evidently mistakes of the stone-cutter. For example, III, 1, 2602 is the epitaph of a father to his son, whose age is represented to be ANNV CLI MESERVM OCTO. Though CLI should perhaps read VII, this and similar cases have been entirely omitted. For Vol. VIII, I have made use of Seidel's 2 tabulation of ages, correcting these from the supplements to this volume which have appeared since he published his study, and I have added the large number of ages at death contained in these two supplementary volumes.

umns.

In tabulating the ages, I have arranged them in three colThe first of these columns, over which "I" stands in each case, contains the number of those whose age is given even to the hour. The second, numbered "2," contains the number of those whose age is not given so exactly as those in column 1, but more definitely than merely to the year. The third column, numbered “3,” contains the number of those whose ages are given merely in years.

In computing averages and percentages I have simply taken into account the years specified, inasmuch as by far the greater majority of cases are only given in years.

The number of persons whose ages at death are given in the C. I. L. amounts in all, according to my tabulation, to

1 See C. I. L., III, I, 529, and 4189.

2 "Ueber roemische Grabinschriften," von Dr. H. Seidel. 1891.