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Students of classical Athens have long needed a resource to which to turn for evidence concerning, and for the state of the scholarship on, Attic demography, including its relationship to debates on other aspects of social history. This scrupulous work, a revision of a 2006 Cambridge dissertation (supervised by R. Osborne), has provided just such a primer for students and recourse for consultation. The first substantive chapter, "Population Structures," explores how we conduct demographic studies on ancient societies (especially regarding model life tables). I would recommend this discussion to a beginning student unhesitatingly, although I did find it quite immersed in adjustments that seemed non-dispositive for the issues at play elsewhere here. Its adjunct, however, "The Sex Structure of the Citizen Population," needed reconsideration from a cross-cultural perspective on societies dominated by subsistence agriculture.
Although A. W. Gomme's monograph of 1933 (The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C. [Oxford]) is often noted, the main interlocutor is M. H. Hansen (especially Demography and Democracy: The Number of Athenian Citizens in the Fourth Century B.C....