Classical Approaches to Population and Family Planning

Abstract

It occurred to me that there were certain topics much canvassed today whose anticipations in ancient Greece and Rome were too little known, even perhaps in classical circles, partly because only recent relaxations in social conventions have made public ventilation of such things fully possible. I hope that I was right in my supposition; and I trust and believe that if I speak freely no one will take offence. When I speak of population I shall not be concerned with the vexed question of figures, and the extent to which they can be deduced for antiquity, but only with Greek and Roman attitudes to the subject, which did sometimes affect political theory, practical policy, and private family planning. The spectre of global overpopulation does not seem to have been in the forefront of men's minds until quite recently. Of course anxiety about population in general terms was sparked off by Malthus' essay of 1798; and it haunts such books as J. S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848). But people were mainly concerned about the particular society to which they belonged. I was therefore surprised to find John Addington Symonds writing in 1891 of our age, when the habitable portions of the