Colleen McCullough estimates about 2 million during the late Republican period (Caesar’s time) which I think is a fair estimate. The Subura had people stacked on top of each other, large extended families crammed into one apartment, and all but the poorest families had at least one slave.
That video is sped up - look at the pedestrians walking, and the way the bikes turn and accelerate. That’s what makes it look so especially terrifying.
I beleive the original is 2:30, although it’s also pretty freaky. As it happens, I just gave a presentation and we hoped to use that very video. One fo the team members had lived in India and said that people did indeed drive like madmen - that vid was a relatively good day!
Also, while there may have been 1 million people, it’s not like the US today where in many places almost every adult has a car. Unless I’m mistaken a majority of the residents were slaves. All the transportation infrastructure had to be there to feed and clothe etc 1 million people, but they weren’t all driving.
I love SDMB.
First offense?
No, not nearly a majority. Most people were small skilled or unskilled laborers. They tended to live in fairly decent tenements, and many scholars believe that communal eating was common, in a restaurant-like arrangement, but based around a community.
Colleen McCulough is a novelist, not a historian. I have not heard any reliable source say more than a million.
I am chastened and disapppointed in equal measure.
Here’s the 2:13 version. It illustrates the absence of traffic control while failing to terrify the soul in quite the same way.
She is a novelist, but one who is an accomplished amateur historian, and I think her estimate is very fair. Considering people on the SDMB cite Monty Python in medieval history threads, mentioning McCullough’s name is a fairly minor sin, IMHO.
The population of ancient Rome is a factual question. You can’t cite novelists for that! If I wrote a thesis on ancient history and included footnotes to Steven Saylor I’m pretty sure it would not go down well.
And the same goes for monty python. You can use it for illustration, because it’s well researched and also because everyone knows it. But not for proof. “Monty Python says it so it must be true”, o rly?
Some novellists, particularly those engaging in historical fiction, use huge assortments of notes ans sources and become absolute experts in the history of the subject or era they’re writing about. Civil War novels frequently show this.
India smindia. Check out Vietnam. I saw many intersections like this in Saigon and Hanoi when i was over there.
ETA: I wouldn’t even say that was rush hour. They are like that all day. It’s cool if you can to find a spot where you can have a beer and observe for a while. We wasted a good bit of time doing that.
When I was in Guangzhou (sister city to Hong Kong), they didn’t have double-yellow lines. They had yellow 6" railings.
People couldn’t even stay to one side of the road, so they built a fn fence.
Didn’t Rome have, you know, a census for figuring out such little things as populations?
Appeal to authority? Naughty, naughty!
They did, but we don’t have those records anymore, for the most part. The most current estimates suggest that at the end of the first century BC, the population of the entire empire, both male and female, was somewhere around 4-5 million, with about 1 million, or a little less in the city itself, although estimates of the city’s population have ranged anywhere from 450,000 to 2 million.
Not correct. In SuperFreakonomics, they say that in NYC in 1900, horse accidents killed 200 dudes, or 1/17000 residents. In 2007, only 274 dudes died, or 1/30000 residents, thus horses and carts were nearly twice as deadly as cars.
I agree that for things such as estimates, Colleen McCullough is a fair but not perfect cite. wiki sez “Estimates of its peak population range from 450,000 to over 3.5 million people with estimates of 1 to 2 million being most popular with historians” so McCullough is right in there with most historians, even though on the high side.
A quarter of the entire Roman Empire, encompassing most of Western Europe, Asia Minor, and North Africa lived in a single city? Wtf?
There’s a confusion here between “citizen population” and “inhabitants”. The people who actually inhabited the territories of the early Roman Empire numbered probably somewhere around 45 million, whereas the number of official Roman citizens was more like 4 to 5 million (cite).
Of course, not all inhabitants of Rome itself were official Roman citizens, but the citizen/non-citizen ratio was naturally much higher in Rome than in the provinces.