Could You Have Survived in the Ancient World?

At some point, many people have wondered, “Could I have survived to a ripe old age if I had been born 2,000 years ago?” If you have ever wondered this, you are in luck, because right now is your chance to find out! In this article, we are going to be exploring some of the most common things that killed people in antiquity at different stages of their lives. We are also going to talk about how, believe it or not, some people in ancient times actually managed to survive to quite impressively old ages, even by twenty-first century standards.

Surviving being born in the ancient world

As is widely known among members of the general populace, the field of medicine has advanced greatly since antiquity and the kind of medical care that people had available in ancient times was nothing at all like the kind we have today. Although ancient medicine had its fair share of cures that actually worked, the vast majority of the treatments that existed in antiquity were either completely ineffective or even harmful. Consequently, regardless of when and where you lived in the pre-modern world, mortality rates for infants and young children were always extremely high.

A very large number of infants never even made it through the birthing process. Childbirth was extremely hazardous and many infants whose lives could be saved today through surgery died in the process of being born. Cesarean section did exist in most major ancient civilizations of the Old World, but there was no way to conduct it without killing the mother, so it was only used as an absolute last resort to save the child’s life after the mother was either already dead or certain to die.

By the way, as I explain in this article from over two years ago, although the term cesarean section probably does indeed come from Julius Caesar’s name, Julius Caesar himself was not actually born by cesarean section, but rather only alleged to have been born by cesarean section according to a much later apocryphal legend.

If I had been born in antiquity, there is a very high chance that I would not have even made it out of my mother’s womb alive because I was a breech baby. The doctors performed a cesarean section to remove me from my mother’s womb safely. If I had been born in antiquity, most likely either me, my mother, or both of us would have died.

ABOVE: Woodcut from 1483 depicting a live infant being rescued from the womb of its dead mother through cesarean section. In ancient times, cesarean section could not be performed without killing the mother and was only used as a last resort if the mother was either already dead or about to die.

Surviving infancy and childhood in the ancient world

Even if an infant made it through the birthing process safely, devastating childhood diseases that have now been totally eradicated in the western world thanks to the miracle of vaccines were extremely common in ancient times. People today often forget just how incredibly deadly diseases like measles, polio, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, mumps, and malaria once were. Children—especially very young children—were especially susceptible to all these illnesses.

Most of us here in the United States know these diseases in name only, but, even as recently as the late nineteenth century, it is estimated that somewhere around a third of all children here in this country died before the age of five. It has only really been in the past century that we have finally managed to conquer these ancient killers.

Of course, even now, we should not grow too comfortable, since new diseases are constantly evolving and it will not be long before they catch up with us. Before you know it, new, incurable diseases every bit as deadly as the ones that ravaged our species in antiquity will return to plague us once again and we will have to wait for modern medicine to catch up with them once again. New diseases to kill us will only stop evolving once the human race is completely extinct.

ABOVE: Woodcut 1860 by the German artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld depicting the death of King David and Bathsheba’s first son as an infant, as described in the Second Book of Samuel

In addition to natural threats, however, infants born in the ancient world had another major threat to worry about. In ancient times, there were no safe and reliable methods of birth control or abortion. Consequently, it was extremely common and generally widely accepted in most ancient cultures for parents to simply abandon their unwanted infants in the wilderness to die of exposure. This manner of infanticide was widespread and commonplace even in so-called “civilized” societies of ancient Greece and Rome.

Unfortunately, if you were born a girl, your chances of surviving infancy plummeted even further because it was especially common for female infants to be deliberately killed in this manner because, quite simply, female infants were always seen as less desirable than male infants. According to some classicists, the percentage of female infants abandoned to die in the wilderness in ancient Greece and Rome may have been as high as 10% in some places during some time periods. It is probably relatively safe to say that, in many places during many periods of ancient history, most people never even lived to adulthood, let alone old age.

ABOVE: Detail from a mid-fifth-century BC Attic red-figure amphora painting of the shepherd Phorbas carrying the infant Oidipous, whose parents, the king and queen of Thebes, had ordered a servant to leave in the wilderness to die of exposure

Surviving young adulthood in antiquity

If you survived the perils of a childhood in antiquity, then your chances of living to old age increased dramatically. Even as a young adult, though, there were still many perils that existed back then that are not so prominent today. In many ancient societies, there were no professional armies and instead armies were made up of the entire male citizenry.

War back then was far more common than it is today; for the ancient Greeks and the Romans of the Republican Period, war was a seasonal occupation for all young men. Mercifully, warfare itself was not as deadly as it usually is today, since people back then were fighting with spears and shields rather than with guns, tanks, and hand grenades, but, if you were a man and you lived in one of those societies, you still had a moderate chance of dying in battle.

ABOVE: Roman marble statue of Menelaos carrying the body of the slain hero Patroklos. Nearly all young men in the ancient world faced the risk of death in battle.

If you were a woman, though, that did not help your chances of survival in adulthood by much because, as I mentioned before, they did not have modern medicine back in those days. Consequently, childbirth was extremely dangerous, not just for the child, but also for the mother giving birth. In fact, it was so perilous that the character Medeia in Euripides’s tragedy Medeia, which was first performed in Athens at the City Dionysia in 431 BC, declares that she would rather fight on the front lines of battle three times than give birth only once.

In ancient times, there was very little a woman could do to get out of bearing children because pleasuring a man sexually and bearing him legitimate offspring to inherit his property and legacy was almost universally regarded as the sole purpose of a woman’s existence. Many, many women in ancient times died during childbirth.

Unfortunately, a woman in the ancient world’s chances of dying in childbirth were further increased by the fact that women in the ancient world typically married much, much younger than women do today. In the ancient world, a woman typically married almost immediately after her first menstrual cycle, usually between the ages of fourteen and seventeen; whereas, by sharp contrast, a man typically married when he was in his early thirties.

Husbands were usually at least around fifteen years older than their wives—sometimes even older than that. Because women were forced to marry so young, their bodies often could not handle the strains of childbirth, resulting in an even higher death rate than they would have experienced had they married at a more mature age.

ABOVE: Attic red-figure pyxis depicting a wedding procession. Women in the ancient world typically married between the ages of fourteen and seventeen to husbands who were in their late thirties.

Surviving mature adulthood

If you lived to be at least thirty years old or so, though, then your chances of making it to old age were pretty good. They were probably not quite as good as your chances of making it to old age today, but they were indeed pretty good. It is true that the average lifespan in the ancient world was probably about thirty years, but this statistic is rather misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that enormous numbers of people died in infancy, childhood, and young adulthood.

The greatest hurdles to survival were birth, infancy, and young childhood. If you managed to survive all of those, then you were lucky and there was a decent probability that you would live a reasonably full life. If you managed to survive to the age of around fifteen years old or so, then the chances were pretty good that you would live to the age of at least fifty. Of course, many people died younger than that, but, during most periods of ancient history, those people were outliers.

Unfortunately, your chances of survival depended heavily on when and where you happened to live. If you were unlucky, plagues and epidemics could easily wipe out sometimes as much as two thirds of the healthy, adult population in a matter of less than a year. For instance, the devastating Plague of Justinian (541 – 542 AD) in late antiquity wiped out somewhere between 13% and 26% of the total population of the whole world in just two years. Famines could also be extremely devastating and could kill off large numbers of otherwise healthy people.

ABOVE: The Plague of Athens, painted by the Flemish Baroque painter Michiel Sweerts between c. 1652 and c. 1654

The survivors

Amidst all these diseases, infanticides, wars, and plagues, you may think that, surely no one in the ancient world ever lived past fifty—but there you would be dead wrong. As surprising as it may seem, there were actually quite a few people in ancient times who lived to extraordinary old age, not just by ancient standards, but even by twenty-first century standards.

Pharaoh Pepi II of the Egyptian Old Kingdom is said to have ascended to the throne in 2278 BC at the age of six. He is said to have ruled until his death in 2184 BC at the age of one hundred years old, which, if accurate, would make him the longest-reigning monarch in all of human history. (Here is a link to an article I wrote about him on my website back in November 2016.)

The ancient Athenian philosopher Sokrates is thought to have been around seventy-three years old and still in reasonably good health at the time of his execution in 399 BC. The renowned Greek philosophers Demokritos of Abdera (lived c. 460 – c. 370 BC) and Diogenes of Sinope (lived c. 412 – c. 323 BC) are both said to have lived to around ninety years old.

ABOVE: Marble head of the Athenian philosopher Sokrates, who was executed at the age of around seventy-three

The 105-five-year-old ancient Athenian

Believe it or not, there were even a few people in ancient times who managed to live past one hundred. An ancient gravestone from the Kerameikos Cemetery in Athens records that its owner, a certain obscure Athenian man named Euphranor, lived to the astounding old age of 105 years. To put that into perspective, on average, only twenty-two out of every 100,000 people in the United States today are over the age of one hundred years.

Because birth certificates did not exist in ancient Athens, this age may be slightly rounded up, but what is certain is that Euphranor of Athens definitely did live to be extraordinarily old and he probably did indeed live past the age of one hundred. It is a sign of humanity’s indominable will to survive that people like Euphranor of Athens were able to live so long. Even with all the odds stacked against them, some people are able to survive through nearly anything.

All of this proves that the maximum amount of time that a person is biologically capable of living has not changed at all since at least the time of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. There is no reason why someone like Jeanne Calment (the oldest person ever recorded, who died on 4 August 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days) could not have lived in antiquity.

The difference between antiquity and today in terms of life expectancy is not how long people are capable of living, but rather the number of people who are living that long. Today there are far more people living to extreme old age than there has ever been before in all of human history. We have not expanded our lifespans, but we have increased the number of people who are living full lifespans.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Kerameikos Cemetery in Athens, Greece, where Euphranor of Athens, a man whose gravestone records that he lived to age of 105 years, was buried over 2,000 years ago

Conclusion

So, what do you think? Could you have lived to 105 in ancient Athens like Euphranor? Or do you think you would have died before you even made it out of your mother’s womb like I probably would have? Perhaps it would not matter. Everyone who ever lived in ancient times is dead now and, someday, everyone who is alive right now will be dead too.

We must remember that, no matter how long we manage to prolong our lives through our modern technology and modern medicine, we will all still die eventually. Sooner or later, the Grim Reaper will come for us all. We cannot live forever; we can only make the most of the time we have. Here is the wise advice given to Gilgamesh in the Old Babylonian version of the epic by the goddess Siduri, as translated by Stephen Mitchell:

“Gilgamesh, where are you roaming?
You will never find the eternal life
that you seek. When the gods created mankind,
they also created death, and they held back
eternal life for themselves alone.
Humans are born, they live, then they die,
this is the order that the gods have decreed.
But until the end comes, enjoy your life,
spend it in happiness, not despair.
Savour your food, make each of your days
a delight, bathe and anoint yourself,
wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean,
let music and dancing fill your house,
love the child who holds you by the hand,
and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.
That is the best way for a man to live.”