How was the Classical world so urbanised

1 million is an underestimation maybe even more than that

This too. Ancient cities could be quite big, but they were few and far between even in heavily urbanized areas like Greece and Italy. Most of the countryside was sparsely settled by farmers, the countless small cities and large towns you find in any modern country would be replaced in an ancient one with a days-long wagon ride to the nearest (only) city once a year to sell your harvest.

In comparison with the middle ages(and up to the 17th century) these places were much more urbanised, definitely around the Mediterranean.

Yes, but the total population was about the same, and even grew in the later middle ages. They were just spread out more densely in the countryside, in more and larger villages, and in market towns in between the villages. A Roman-era farm might have a thousand slaves working it, supporting ten thousand citizens in Rome. That same area in the middle ages would support ten thousand peasant farmers in situ, since long distance trade was no longer reliable.

>Sicily had a population of a million in the 5th century BC of which 50% might have lived in cities.
How did you come across this figure, because not all of the "citizens" of a polis actually lived in the city itself, they just traveled into it to participate in politics and other communal events.

>5th Century BC
>Widespread peace

I would read Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Mass urbanization was possible because of the bountiful climate conditions, when these changed so did the urban-rural divide. Whilst not the only change, the decrease in sustainable and regular food supplies made it much harder for cities or an extremely centralized state to survive, this coupled with the political disintegration of the Roman empire ensured that there just wasn't enough resources to justify big cities or to sustain them, so they were abandoned.

I guess the survival of the Roman empire past the crisis of the third century shows that it was possible for cities to survive in these conditions, but they were drastically changed and nothing like the cities of the past. In short, classical era Greece couldn't happen again, or Roman era urban centres, because the climate changed and cities became unsustainable.

This is something of a meme, yes there was a "little ice age" after the Roman period, but populations actually went UP. Urbanization is a cultural phenomena, it was a big deal for the Romans and Greeks because they made it a big deal, it didn't matter to the Germanic barbarians so they didn't build cities, even tho as we well know Germany is well suited to urbanization.

1M in 5th century BC seems far fetched.

Sicily probably had quite a large number, but nowhere near that. The largest listed here is Xaidu/Babylon during the 5th century. 300K/200K respectively. Carthage manage to surpass them @ 500K in 4th century BCE. Alexandria @ 1st century BCE @ 600K and then 1M @ 100 BCE. Rome tookover @ 1M in 100 CE.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history

I'm gonna guess because they were developed, and the Med was a hub for international trade. That trade broke down after the Crisis of the Third Century, and never recovered. Then Rome became less urbanized and more regional.

Because in ancient city-states 80% of population were free farmers(which counts as citizens) and slaves engaged in agriculture even inside of the city walls, numbers of merchants and artisans were very very low. So basicaly ancient city was a unity of village communities with agora and acropolis in the middle of rural area inside of city walls. Not very impressive to be honest.

interesting, that sounds like something that would make sense in ancient greece, could you give a source for this?
I also wonder why republics and states with citizenship were more prominent in the ancient world, maybe this could be tied to it.

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5th century bc had widespread peace in the America way as the Pax Romana did, wars were constant, but they didn’t hamper business or trade and rarely involved major city sieges.

Sicily isn't a city yaknow

>why republics and states with citizenship were more prominent in the ancient world
Common amongst city-state only, because it's a pretty reasonable way to do things. Larger states with republics were comparatively rare.

Carthage springs to mind

It wasn't. Majority of people lived in villages or in mobile tribal bands that were untouched by the urbanized kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean, and the river valleys. Western Mediterranean cities were unsustainable without Roman trade subsidies and defense provision and fell apart when the Roman government was replaced by barbarian kingdoms.

Cities didn't fall in the east.

It was. Though, I’m referring to the classicsl world before the roman empire in the OP

The "classical world" was the Greek Penninsula, the Nile Delta, and Mesopotamia. Ancient history focuses on a very small portion of the world.

Urbanization rates are always very iffy in antiquity, since it's really hard to actually gauge how many people lived in the countryside, but by and large the reasons for the higher rates were the centrality of cities as power centres, instead of decentralized feudal societies where there was enough resources for the kind of public works necessary to allow cities to grow beyond a few thousands (aqueducts and sanitation), and a mostly unified world centered around the Mediterranean and Black seas, which allowed for a massive grain trade from smaller agricultural communities to the larger cities. Rome could never have reached a million people without being fed grain by the whole north african ocast, it would have been too expensive to move it through the appennines. Same goes for Athens and all other greek cities relying on the swarm of black sea greekophone communities exporting shipload after shipload of grain to Hellas.
All this trade pretty much collapsed halfway through the first millennium.

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there is a lot about the ancient world that is impressive(especially the greek world), high literacy, high urbanisation, mass mobilisation, large sections of the population being able to travel and many even started enterprises or expeditions; the richest man in Athens was once a slave

One answer is the existence of trading and proper bread baskets. In medieval Europe, shipping grain just was not practical - its price doubled every 30 kilometers it traveled due to expensive shipping. But as classical population centers had proper harbors, shipping grain from Africa/Middle East was much more possible.

>5th century bc
>pax romana

That doesn't seem likely to me, Mesoamerica had comparable urbanization to much of what's been said in this thread, yet had even more difficulties with trade due to the lack of horses.

Attached: Comparsion between bronze age old world and postclassic mesoamerica from The Postclassic Mesoamerica (1585x4078, 1.88M)

Yeah this is also strange, how?

it is legitimately weird how dynamic classical greece was in comparison to what happened to it during the middle ages