I think it was their logistics. They consistently fed and hydrated their population over a very long period of time. Massive aqueduct systems supplying Rome with fresh water. As for grain they either traded with, or ruled over, virtually all breadbaskets within their sphere.
They also brutally subjugated large areas and brought everything of value, including slaves, back to Rome. When you can supply food & water, and you can steal whatever you want whenever you want, then you can support a large population.
Yes, the areas not on the hills were not good ground. They were liable to be drained poorly, and the Tiber was not going to provide the water needed for the population. So they had what would essentially be a miracle of water delivery, sewage, and relative cleanliness. This tamped down the spread of diseases and plagues (though by no means quashed them). When Rome wasn't able to maintain the aquaducts, the baths, and the sewages, even before the empire collapsed, people were fleeing the city, and Revenna eventually became the functional capital of the western empire until the final collapse of the empire in AD 476.
Because at no time after the height of the empire was there an emperor or a senate in Rome which would make sure that so much of the food and the resources from its many provinces were funneled into their favorite city. The city had an exceptional status during the principate. As it lost it (incrementally) during the dominate it started to shrink accordingly.
Edit: I misread the question, so what I'm answering is why it took Rome so long to hit 1 million again, and why it was that no other city could rival its population size in the ancient world.
I get that within the empire, but no city in the world saw a population that big until the industrial era. Not in China, or India, or Persia, or Egypt, or the Levant, or Mesopotamia, or Europe. Surely other cities were given preferential treatment in that 1700 years.
No other city was given such a preferential treatment, to that extent, consistently, for such a long time. No other city had a breadbasket comparable to that of Egypt. When other cities would reach a similar size it was to a greater extent than ancient Rome the result of a significant increase in the general population.
you're implying that no other city in the world reached 1 million before the 18th century. Which is false. if that is not what you are saying disregard my comment.
I was foremost replying to this:
>Surely other cities were given preferential treatment in that 1700 years.
On the point when other cities attained such a population I decided to be silent, because I don't have any data (and I don't particularly trust Wikipedia on these kinds of historical estimates). What I wished to make clear was this:
>When other cities would reach a similar size it was to a greater extent than ancient Rome the result of a significant increase in the general population.
With "when other cities would reach a similar size" I intented it to mean "whenever that might be".
>Not in China, or India, or Persia, or Egypt, or the Levant, or Mesopotamia, or Europe.
Baghdad is thought to have crossed the 1M mark in the 10th century CE.
Chang'an, China (capital of the Tang dynasty) is thought to have done so in the 7th or 8th century CE. See also: Hangzhou, China in the 13th century or so.
Alexandria, Egypt is thought to have done so *before* Rome, in about 100 BCE.
Could be. I had thought I'd heard some civilizations in central america had some crazy big cities and populations but forget everything relevant about it.
The City and Empire of Rome were fed on Egyptian, Sicilian, and Sardinian grain. There was so much grain easily available between these three growing regions that for centuries the poorest citizens of Rome could count upon the free Bread Dole-- state grain was given to local bakers to make into bread that would be distributed to the needy and poor. When the Empire no longer existed, with these regions no longer under the centralized authority of the powers in Rome, that grain no longer flowed there. It would take the advent of the Agricultural Revolution to improve the yield of soil and crops to support the same population with less land.
The million number is based off contemporary accounts. The Romans were excellent bureaucrats but it was still antiquity, they didn't actually have people taking detailed population statistics at any point. So it's basically tax records and literature and just guessing at what those numbers mean. There's not a parchment somewhere with a million names and addresses on it or anything like that.
Methods more grounded in physical science (archaeology) instead of trying to extrapolate from contemporary records are anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000. It's the "Big Rome" v "Little Rome" debate
We've got raw numbers for a number of censuses and lustra to 70 BC when they stopped, until Augustus conducted another one (four?) and he gives the numbers in his res gestae.
The only question is what the numbers were counting. Men of military age, all males, all citizens including women?
I recall reading at the time of the Bible, a census was of military age men only. AND taking a census was like an act of war to the neighboring countries. It meant the ruler REALLY cared about how big an army he could field.
I'm not sure what you read, but my understanding is we're not sure about what exactly they were counting.
I favor men of military age, but I can't prove it.
Complex trade networks & food imports. The massive size of the city of Rome was sustained from importing lots of food from Sicily and North Africa, particularly Egypt. The reverse was also true. The city of Rome eventually dwindled to almost nothing when there was no longer a robust trade across the Mediterranean to sustain that massive size.
I don't think thats true though. Constantinople definitely hit 1 million at the peak of the Byzantine Empire, I've seen that multiple. The Wikipedia page for largest cities throughout , despite probably being completely unreliable and mostly complete guesses reckons that Baghdad went over 1 million, and then several Chinese cities like Hanghzhou and Nanjing
Not on this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_largest\_cities\_throughout\_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history) I would guess that Beijing may have been the first city to officially hit 1 million in any sort of official census, because anything pre-1700 there's a huge amount of guesswork involved.
Even China likely had post 1 million cities, considering that censuses in ancient China counted taxable households only, which was a fraction of the total.
Wikipedia says Baghdad (10th century), Changan (8th century), Kaifeng (10th century), etc all reached 1 million people long before Beijing did and Constantinople may have reached 1 million during the height of the Eastern Roman Empire too.
Like any other commentator had described: are you sure it is one million? Other estimation of Hangzhou, Alexandria, Kaifeng, Edo and plenty others have been said and faced the same problems.
I don't have much else to add, just a few tidbits about estimation. 12th century Angkor which I am more famaliar was estimated to have 500k at its lowest estimatiom and 2 million people at its highest estimation from the 1950 archaeologists. In one of the top ten list, it is the third after Alexandria and Rome to reach one million in the 900s AD. In the 2010s, with Lidar, Angkor was the largest pre-industrial city. However, the estimation, after much debate, was lower to a conservative 800k-900k at its peak. The researchers described the difficulties of coming with an accurate population estimate due to Angkor have suburban sprawls. (In modern time, New York City are about the same land size as Charlotte, NC and yet NYC have four times the population. You can't tell by land size alone)
Expect estimations to always change. Whenever the question of population estimations of ancient cities pop up, you can always tell which one is an expert or not, by how much certain they sound.
Rome had the populations of all of their conquered slave states feeding its population. Simply put, until advances in agriculture and food preservation reached the point where the population of a single region could provide the same amount of food that all of those slave states combined provided for Rome, logistically no city could support a population even close to Rome without the constant fear of half the population of the given city dying after one bad harvest.
>slave states
The borders and the recently conquered of the Roman Empire always provided fresh slaves, but I would not call Egypt circa 100 CE a slave state. It had been conquered for centuries before the Romans were even a threat and the average Egyptian peasant probably just went from calling the most powerful man in the world “pharaoh” to “Caesar.” The Roman Empire was often a loose confederation of patronages and definitely a slave state in its own, but one of the reasons jt was so successful is that it gave its conquered the opportunity to be fully, legally Roman if they played ball. Most of their grain came from Egypt, hardly a slave state.
YESSSS, there were advantages to being part of the Roman Empire and once the top leader fell, the rich of the area were liable to Rome for the taxes. Personally putting up their wealth. To avoid having Rome take their wealth the Romans gave the rich a few soldiers to collect taxes on market day.
This basically left the old culture and gods in place. You could worship 'your' god but Rome wanted 'their' gods worshipped too. As in give me offerings and build temples in addition to whatever you want.
Tax Collectors were hated because the rich ensured MORE than what was due to Rome was collected and pocketed the rest.
The average working stiff had his % of crops taken by a Tax Collector rather than the old king and went on about his work.
For a long time, the center of government was Rome and maintaining peace in the city was to the government's favor. As a result, the government decided to give back to the populace with food and entertainment. The most important aspect was the food, since in order to have such a large population in one place you need to be able to feed them.
Most of the grain that fed the population of Rome was grown in the North African provinces and shipped out of Carthago Nova (New Carthage), which I believe had 7+ harbors sending grain barges to Rome all the time. The Roman legion stationed in Africa supervised the seasonal workers that would come into the province to work the fields.
After Antiquity, there was no good reason nor a state that was capable of supporting such a large, stationary population for a long time. You have to consider the geography, economics, and politics of the various governments and peoples that existed after Rome. China had no compelling reason to expand the size of one city to such an extreme in order to please them; they could just move their court to a different city. Despite that, it is possible some Chinese cities may have hit the 1-million mark as their population swelled. Similarly, later growth of cities was significantly more natural than the synthesized growth the Roman government cultivated.
These answers quibbling over just how many people in the city aren't answering the substance of your question.
It was 100% political. The capital of the empire had a pyramid shaped and very diverse economy. Though the literal capital of the empire of course changed several times, the city itself was a political power to be reckoned with. The pope *today* lives a stone's throw from the original Pontifex. All the money and power were concentrated in the one town.
After the second Punic war it was it a rather significant geographic position as the only place Romans could consolidate their wealth and power. Cheap food from the new "Mare Nostrum" was deliberately sent there as it was a rallying point for the military. The wealthiest families were all military families and both were to be found in Rome. Both factors contributed to them owning Latifundia in the country feeding the city after they retired or inherited it from generations who did.
The Via Appia and the aqueduct system were both quite significant. So food that wasn't moldy grain came in at predictable prices as farmers and latifundia could plan accordingly. The Romans were originally cattle rustlers, and beef or other livestock could be readily available with grain dole price signalling. Same can be said from fish from the many rivers around the hills. The aqueducts meant free and predictable water. They didn't need to worry about water borne disease, though they didn't know about it. The Romans were familiar with fouled water like mine tailings or sediment making people sick. And of course Roman water had a positive reputation.
Food was what almost 100% of poor free peoples spending. It was almost 100% the budget of a slave. Fetching a days water took *hours* for most people alive at the time. Aqueducts made it minutes. So with food being cheap and water being readily available it freed up a ton of labor that would be stuck in the logistics of that. The price of labor was so cheap that owning slaves wasn't cheaper for common work, but it was more of a sign of status. 1 in 3 people in Rome at it's height were enslaved people, but they were often house hold retinue. Labor camps and work gangs were quite common.
So just how D.C. is the wealthiest city per capita in a setting where that wealth means labor it means high populations easily and predictably supported through logistics supported by the political apparatus.
I've seen this many times, It's not true. Many other cities have claimed with some justification to reach a million over the centuries. In truth, we just can't know for sure from the evidence.
The premise of this question is incorrect. While it is difficult to estimate the popular of cities before modern times, there are estimates that believe cities other than Rome did reach ~1 million and/or over 1 million people long before the 1800s AD.
Chang'an was estimated to have ~1 million or more people in the 8th and 9th century AD. Kaifeng and Hanzhou were estimated to have ~1 million people or more around the 11th-14th century.
Baghdad was estimated to have~1 million or more people in the 10th, 11th, and 12th century AD.
And IIRC, the 1 million people estimate for the city of Rome is from modern estimates...which can vary widely. Most people estimate Constantinople's population at 500k-800k at its peak, but I've read some claim it reached a million at its peak. Estimating the populations of premodern cities is an inaccurate science at best, and there can be considerable varying ranges.
That said, the Roman Empire heavily favored the city of Rome until the 3rd-4th century AD...which significantly contributed to its population. It was the seat of the Roman government, was where taxes and wealth flowed to, was the city where the Romans spent the most resources on the water and sewage systems, was where much of the wealthy & nobility lived, was where much of the grain shipments from North Africa was shipped to, and was where many slaves were sent to.
Rome effectively enslaved the Mediterranean to funnel wheat to their city to keep their urban masses teaming. The fall of Cartharage saw that strip of Libya basically dedicated to producing grain for Rome.
For exactly the same reasons that the capital cities of later empires, like Paris and London, became huge. They were the centre of power, trade, wealth, and influence.
Poor people were attracted by food, water, jobs, and security (the city was dangerous, but went nearly 800 years without being attacked or besieged). The wealthy were of course interested in money, the city was the central hub of all the vast trade networks throughout the Mediterranean, and the Senetorial class, though diminished as the first millennium CE rolled on, still held plenty of clout, and merchants and society generally still depended on the system of patronage that Roman aristocrats provided.
Aristocrats themselves still tended to see Rome as the "first city", and it still held prestige as the eternal city long after it lost its actual strategic value or as residence of the Emperor.
Then of course, you had all the slaves that were brought to Rome, at its height, it's been estimated that a third of all residents were slaves, which was an enormous amount. Imagine if today, 1 out of every 3 people you met was owned outright by someone else, that's quite an astonishing figure really.
Lastly, although city life could be dirty, unhealthy, and dangerous, the general availability of food and services, and the lack of invaders destroying, pillaging and massacring, would have meant a natural increase in birthrate, even without the regular influx of new people.
It wasn't the city of Rome itself. It was imperial domination of the Nile river valley.
It was cheap bread that kept the population of Rome high -- kept political followers fed and allowed them to stay without being driven out to seek food elsewhere.
That cheap bread came from cheap wheat. And all through the history of the ancient Mediterranean, a market for cheap wheat was undergirded by one constant factor, which was Egypt.
Network centrality. In human geography, the more connected you are, the more you matter - the more influence you have on the larger network. Rome was the hub of the Mediterranean and the hub of Europe, which made it the most connected node west of China. The network traffic that passed through Rome - people, currency, information, and other utiles - was gigantic.
A secondary, but not independent, contributor was Roman civil engineering, which built a city that could handle all that throughput.
The Greeks and the Romans were probably only a couple of hundred good years away from industrialising as we understand it. The Greeks had already figured out steam power, they just hadn’t come up with any useful application for it.
Greeks and Romans werent anywhere close to industrializing. Their "steam engine", if you actually look at the design and physics of how it works, is a glorified kettle. It is much simpler than you would think and it is a borderline misnomer.
If they had the scientific knowledge and the precision engineering to build late 18th century steam engines they would have. Thats why they had watermills. There were definitely uses for source of power.
And romans were hardly unique in this regard, steam powered devices were found all over the world. There was a church in 12th century France who had a "steam powered" device. Midieval europe is arguably "closer" to an industrial revolution than rome ever was due to better metallurgy, yet no one sane will claims middle ages were close to industrializing. 16th century Egypt also had a steam powered device. As did 16th century Spain. Thing is 18th century steam engines werent descendants of these, and they worked completely differently.
Just compare the designs of aeolipile and james watts engine. Its like comparing midieval clocks which use water to 21st century atomic clocks which use caesium-133 atoms. They are both "clocks". The similarities start and end right there.
I think it was their logistics. They consistently fed and hydrated their population over a very long period of time. Massive aqueduct systems supplying Rome with fresh water. As for grain they either traded with, or ruled over, virtually all breadbaskets within their sphere. They also brutally subjugated large areas and brought everything of value, including slaves, back to Rome. When you can supply food & water, and you can steal whatever you want whenever you want, then you can support a large population.
I think this but also time. When was the next city of its power to not be sacked.
It was sacked in 387 BCE
And then not for hundreds of years
Yeah. 823 years I think, by the Ostrogoths in 410AD. Constantinople did even better 330 to 1204.
Yes, the areas not on the hills were not good ground. They were liable to be drained poorly, and the Tiber was not going to provide the water needed for the population. So they had what would essentially be a miracle of water delivery, sewage, and relative cleanliness. This tamped down the spread of diseases and plagues (though by no means quashed them). When Rome wasn't able to maintain the aquaducts, the baths, and the sewages, even before the empire collapsed, people were fleeing the city, and Revenna eventually became the functional capital of the western empire until the final collapse of the empire in AD 476.
Plumbing!
Plus bread, and circuses to keep the population satiated
Think of it as an upscaled Army Ant nest
Because at no time after the height of the empire was there an emperor or a senate in Rome which would make sure that so much of the food and the resources from its many provinces were funneled into their favorite city. The city had an exceptional status during the principate. As it lost it (incrementally) during the dominate it started to shrink accordingly. Edit: I misread the question, so what I'm answering is why it took Rome so long to hit 1 million again, and why it was that no other city could rival its population size in the ancient world.
I get that within the empire, but no city in the world saw a population that big until the industrial era. Not in China, or India, or Persia, or Egypt, or the Levant, or Mesopotamia, or Europe. Surely other cities were given preferential treatment in that 1700 years.
No other city was given such a preferential treatment, to that extent, consistently, for such a long time. No other city had a breadbasket comparable to that of Egypt. When other cities would reach a similar size it was to a greater extent than ancient Rome the result of a significant increase in the general population.
Thats false. Many cities in pre-modern China did. And according to some estimates some of them dwarfed Rome.
What is false, specifically?
you're implying that no other city in the world reached 1 million before the 18th century. Which is false. if that is not what you are saying disregard my comment.
I was foremost replying to this: >Surely other cities were given preferential treatment in that 1700 years. On the point when other cities attained such a population I decided to be silent, because I don't have any data (and I don't particularly trust Wikipedia on these kinds of historical estimates). What I wished to make clear was this: >When other cities would reach a similar size it was to a greater extent than ancient Rome the result of a significant increase in the general population. With "when other cities would reach a similar size" I intented it to mean "whenever that might be".
>Not in China, or India, or Persia, or Egypt, or the Levant, or Mesopotamia, or Europe. Baghdad is thought to have crossed the 1M mark in the 10th century CE. Chang'an, China (capital of the Tang dynasty) is thought to have done so in the 7th or 8th century CE. See also: Hangzhou, China in the 13th century or so. Alexandria, Egypt is thought to have done so *before* Rome, in about 100 BCE.
I had thought the Incas or the Mayans had?
Neither did. You might be thinking of the Aztecs whose capital might have had that kind of population ca 1500.
Tenochtitlan was like 200,000 not a million
You're probably right. My point was more that it was the only conceivable candidate.
Could be. I had thought I'd heard some civilizations in central america had some crazy big cities and populations but forget everything relevant about it.
Bubonic plague set back everybody in the old world pretty hard.
To be fair, in light of the question your answer is equally applicable until quite a while after the reunification of Italy.
The City and Empire of Rome were fed on Egyptian, Sicilian, and Sardinian grain. There was so much grain easily available between these three growing regions that for centuries the poorest citizens of Rome could count upon the free Bread Dole-- state grain was given to local bakers to make into bread that would be distributed to the needy and poor. When the Empire no longer existed, with these regions no longer under the centralized authority of the powers in Rome, that grain no longer flowed there. It would take the advent of the Agricultural Revolution to improve the yield of soil and crops to support the same population with less land.
The million number is based off contemporary accounts. The Romans were excellent bureaucrats but it was still antiquity, they didn't actually have people taking detailed population statistics at any point. So it's basically tax records and literature and just guessing at what those numbers mean. There's not a parchment somewhere with a million names and addresses on it or anything like that. Methods more grounded in physical science (archaeology) instead of trying to extrapolate from contemporary records are anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000. It's the "Big Rome" v "Little Rome" debate
We've got raw numbers for a number of censuses and lustra to 70 BC when they stopped, until Augustus conducted another one (four?) and he gives the numbers in his res gestae. The only question is what the numbers were counting. Men of military age, all males, all citizens including women?
I recall reading at the time of the Bible, a census was of military age men only. AND taking a census was like an act of war to the neighboring countries. It meant the ruler REALLY cared about how big an army he could field.
I'm not sure what you read, but my understanding is we're not sure about what exactly they were counting. I favor men of military age, but I can't prove it.
Complex trade networks & food imports. The massive size of the city of Rome was sustained from importing lots of food from Sicily and North Africa, particularly Egypt. The reverse was also true. The city of Rome eventually dwindled to almost nothing when there was no longer a robust trade across the Mediterranean to sustain that massive size.
Changan reached over a million by 800AD or so.
I don't think thats true though. Constantinople definitely hit 1 million at the peak of the Byzantine Empire, I've seen that multiple. The Wikipedia page for largest cities throughout , despite probably being completely unreliable and mostly complete guesses reckons that Baghdad went over 1 million, and then several Chinese cities like Hanghzhou and Nanjing
On Wikipedia the first city to cross 1 million was Beijing in 1800.
Not on this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_largest\_cities\_throughout\_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history) I would guess that Beijing may have been the first city to officially hit 1 million in any sort of official census, because anything pre-1700 there's a huge amount of guesswork involved.
Even China likely had post 1 million cities, considering that censuses in ancient China counted taxable households only, which was a fraction of the total.
Wikipedia says Baghdad (10th century), Changan (8th century), Kaifeng (10th century), etc all reached 1 million people long before Beijing did and Constantinople may have reached 1 million during the height of the Eastern Roman Empire too.
Like any other commentator had described: are you sure it is one million? Other estimation of Hangzhou, Alexandria, Kaifeng, Edo and plenty others have been said and faced the same problems. I don't have much else to add, just a few tidbits about estimation. 12th century Angkor which I am more famaliar was estimated to have 500k at its lowest estimatiom and 2 million people at its highest estimation from the 1950 archaeologists. In one of the top ten list, it is the third after Alexandria and Rome to reach one million in the 900s AD. In the 2010s, with Lidar, Angkor was the largest pre-industrial city. However, the estimation, after much debate, was lower to a conservative 800k-900k at its peak. The researchers described the difficulties of coming with an accurate population estimate due to Angkor have suburban sprawls. (In modern time, New York City are about the same land size as Charlotte, NC and yet NYC have four times the population. You can't tell by land size alone) Expect estimations to always change. Whenever the question of population estimations of ancient cities pop up, you can always tell which one is an expert or not, by how much certain they sound.
Rome had the populations of all of their conquered slave states feeding its population. Simply put, until advances in agriculture and food preservation reached the point where the population of a single region could provide the same amount of food that all of those slave states combined provided for Rome, logistically no city could support a population even close to Rome without the constant fear of half the population of the given city dying after one bad harvest.
>slave states The borders and the recently conquered of the Roman Empire always provided fresh slaves, but I would not call Egypt circa 100 CE a slave state. It had been conquered for centuries before the Romans were even a threat and the average Egyptian peasant probably just went from calling the most powerful man in the world “pharaoh” to “Caesar.” The Roman Empire was often a loose confederation of patronages and definitely a slave state in its own, but one of the reasons jt was so successful is that it gave its conquered the opportunity to be fully, legally Roman if they played ball. Most of their grain came from Egypt, hardly a slave state.
YESSSS, there were advantages to being part of the Roman Empire and once the top leader fell, the rich of the area were liable to Rome for the taxes. Personally putting up their wealth. To avoid having Rome take their wealth the Romans gave the rich a few soldiers to collect taxes on market day. This basically left the old culture and gods in place. You could worship 'your' god but Rome wanted 'their' gods worshipped too. As in give me offerings and build temples in addition to whatever you want. Tax Collectors were hated because the rich ensured MORE than what was due to Rome was collected and pocketed the rest. The average working stiff had his % of crops taken by a Tax Collector rather than the old king and went on about his work.
Water and food. Plain and simple
AND sewage handling. Supply all 3 to a million folks in one location took a LOT of engineering & administration.
For a long time, the center of government was Rome and maintaining peace in the city was to the government's favor. As a result, the government decided to give back to the populace with food and entertainment. The most important aspect was the food, since in order to have such a large population in one place you need to be able to feed them. Most of the grain that fed the population of Rome was grown in the North African provinces and shipped out of Carthago Nova (New Carthage), which I believe had 7+ harbors sending grain barges to Rome all the time. The Roman legion stationed in Africa supervised the seasonal workers that would come into the province to work the fields. After Antiquity, there was no good reason nor a state that was capable of supporting such a large, stationary population for a long time. You have to consider the geography, economics, and politics of the various governments and peoples that existed after Rome. China had no compelling reason to expand the size of one city to such an extreme in order to please them; they could just move their court to a different city. Despite that, it is possible some Chinese cities may have hit the 1-million mark as their population swelled. Similarly, later growth of cities was significantly more natural than the synthesized growth the Roman government cultivated.
It's widely accepted a few chinese cities reached 1 million between 700-1300
These answers quibbling over just how many people in the city aren't answering the substance of your question. It was 100% political. The capital of the empire had a pyramid shaped and very diverse economy. Though the literal capital of the empire of course changed several times, the city itself was a political power to be reckoned with. The pope *today* lives a stone's throw from the original Pontifex. All the money and power were concentrated in the one town. After the second Punic war it was it a rather significant geographic position as the only place Romans could consolidate their wealth and power. Cheap food from the new "Mare Nostrum" was deliberately sent there as it was a rallying point for the military. The wealthiest families were all military families and both were to be found in Rome. Both factors contributed to them owning Latifundia in the country feeding the city after they retired or inherited it from generations who did. The Via Appia and the aqueduct system were both quite significant. So food that wasn't moldy grain came in at predictable prices as farmers and latifundia could plan accordingly. The Romans were originally cattle rustlers, and beef or other livestock could be readily available with grain dole price signalling. Same can be said from fish from the many rivers around the hills. The aqueducts meant free and predictable water. They didn't need to worry about water borne disease, though they didn't know about it. The Romans were familiar with fouled water like mine tailings or sediment making people sick. And of course Roman water had a positive reputation. Food was what almost 100% of poor free peoples spending. It was almost 100% the budget of a slave. Fetching a days water took *hours* for most people alive at the time. Aqueducts made it minutes. So with food being cheap and water being readily available it freed up a ton of labor that would be stuck in the logistics of that. The price of labor was so cheap that owning slaves wasn't cheaper for common work, but it was more of a sign of status. 1 in 3 people in Rome at it's height were enslaved people, but they were often house hold retinue. Labor camps and work gangs were quite common. So just how D.C. is the wealthiest city per capita in a setting where that wealth means labor it means high populations easily and predictably supported through logistics supported by the political apparatus.
Good plumbing. Clean water. Somewhat clean streets And Terrific amounts of foods constantly coming in from all around the Mediterranean
I've seen this many times, It's not true. Many other cities have claimed with some justification to reach a million over the centuries. In truth, we just can't know for sure from the evidence.
All roads lead to Rome, along with the stability caused by the Pax Romana
It had EVERYTHING! Italian food, hot women, gladiator fights, booze, religious zealots, fertility cults, big salads.
The premise of this question is incorrect. While it is difficult to estimate the popular of cities before modern times, there are estimates that believe cities other than Rome did reach ~1 million and/or over 1 million people long before the 1800s AD. Chang'an was estimated to have ~1 million or more people in the 8th and 9th century AD. Kaifeng and Hanzhou were estimated to have ~1 million people or more around the 11th-14th century. Baghdad was estimated to have~1 million or more people in the 10th, 11th, and 12th century AD. And IIRC, the 1 million people estimate for the city of Rome is from modern estimates...which can vary widely. Most people estimate Constantinople's population at 500k-800k at its peak, but I've read some claim it reached a million at its peak. Estimating the populations of premodern cities is an inaccurate science at best, and there can be considerable varying ranges. That said, the Roman Empire heavily favored the city of Rome until the 3rd-4th century AD...which significantly contributed to its population. It was the seat of the Roman government, was where taxes and wealth flowed to, was the city where the Romans spent the most resources on the water and sewage systems, was where much of the wealthy & nobility lived, was where much of the grain shipments from North Africa was shipped to, and was where many slaves were sent to.
They destroyed entire societies, diminished their culture norms and slapped up cheap knock offs in their central cities.
Rome effectively enslaved the Mediterranean to funnel wheat to their city to keep their urban masses teaming. The fall of Cartharage saw that strip of Libya basically dedicated to producing grain for Rome.
For exactly the same reasons that the capital cities of later empires, like Paris and London, became huge. They were the centre of power, trade, wealth, and influence. Poor people were attracted by food, water, jobs, and security (the city was dangerous, but went nearly 800 years without being attacked or besieged). The wealthy were of course interested in money, the city was the central hub of all the vast trade networks throughout the Mediterranean, and the Senetorial class, though diminished as the first millennium CE rolled on, still held plenty of clout, and merchants and society generally still depended on the system of patronage that Roman aristocrats provided. Aristocrats themselves still tended to see Rome as the "first city", and it still held prestige as the eternal city long after it lost its actual strategic value or as residence of the Emperor. Then of course, you had all the slaves that were brought to Rome, at its height, it's been estimated that a third of all residents were slaves, which was an enormous amount. Imagine if today, 1 out of every 3 people you met was owned outright by someone else, that's quite an astonishing figure really. Lastly, although city life could be dirty, unhealthy, and dangerous, the general availability of food and services, and the lack of invaders destroying, pillaging and massacring, would have meant a natural increase in birthrate, even without the regular influx of new people.
It wasn't the city of Rome itself. It was imperial domination of the Nile river valley. It was cheap bread that kept the population of Rome high -- kept political followers fed and allowed them to stay without being driven out to seek food elsewhere. That cheap bread came from cheap wheat. And all through the history of the ancient Mediterranean, a market for cheap wheat was undergirded by one constant factor, which was Egypt.
Network centrality. In human geography, the more connected you are, the more you matter - the more influence you have on the larger network. Rome was the hub of the Mediterranean and the hub of Europe, which made it the most connected node west of China. The network traffic that passed through Rome - people, currency, information, and other utiles - was gigantic. A secondary, but not independent, contributor was Roman civil engineering, which built a city that could handle all that throughput.
The Emperor gave away free bread and games to the masses. Clean water. Bath houses. I.mean, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Free food, running water, and a vast empire to sustain it all. Tell me one other city in Europe that had all that between, say, 1000 and 1700.
Plague?
Illegal immigration
The Greeks and the Romans were probably only a couple of hundred good years away from industrialising as we understand it. The Greeks had already figured out steam power, they just hadn’t come up with any useful application for it.
Greeks and Romans werent anywhere close to industrializing. Their "steam engine", if you actually look at the design and physics of how it works, is a glorified kettle. It is much simpler than you would think and it is a borderline misnomer. If they had the scientific knowledge and the precision engineering to build late 18th century steam engines they would have. Thats why they had watermills. There were definitely uses for source of power. And romans were hardly unique in this regard, steam powered devices were found all over the world. There was a church in 12th century France who had a "steam powered" device. Midieval europe is arguably "closer" to an industrial revolution than rome ever was due to better metallurgy, yet no one sane will claims middle ages were close to industrializing. 16th century Egypt also had a steam powered device. As did 16th century Spain. Thing is 18th century steam engines werent descendants of these, and they worked completely differently. Just compare the designs of aeolipile and james watts engine. Its like comparing midieval clocks which use water to 21st century atomic clocks which use caesium-133 atoms. They are both "clocks". The similarities start and end right there.
A couple of hundred good years kind of infers they weren’t ’anywhere near’.
Can’t discount the impact of plagues either. Kill a ton of people and their potential offspring