There is a basic rule of thumb that in the classical world people lived shorter lives than we do, that they were also shorter in stature than modern Europeans, and that their animals were smaller too. All those “facts” are partly correct – but as always, it’s more complicated. And some extraordinary Roman shoes recently discovered near Hadrian’s Wall turn out to be a giant puzzle.
On life expectancy, the standard estimate of Roman life expectancy at birth is somewhere between the early twenties and the early thirties. This doesn’t mean that if you made it to forty-five in Rome you would have seemed incredibly old. The key words are life expectancy at birth. The assumption is, comparing ancient Rome with other pre-industrial societies, that 50 per cent of the children born alive would have died, often of the childhood diseases that we can prevent or cure, by the age of ten. If you made it to ten, you would then have a further life expectancy shorter than a modern one, but not that much shorter. There would have been plenty of people in Rome in their fifties and sixties.
The apparently obvious way of getting a more accurate figure – that is, using the ages regularly given on Roman tombstones to produce an average – won’t work, by the way. Sadly what that computation gives you is the average age at death of those who were commemorated on tombstones, which significantly over-represents beloved children, young women dying in childbirth, and the generally well off (tombstones are pricey), while under-representing those without close relatives interested in remembering them, as well as the poor.
In terms of size – both of animals and humans – there is clearer physical evidence to go on, from skeletal remains, and such things as horses’ tackle, bits etc. There is no doubt that animals were on average smaller than the modern equivalents, so that some Roman horses were more like what we would call ponies. But, at the same time, selective breeding meant that in northern Europe Roman animals were larger than they had been earlier, in the pre-Roman period (I don’t think we need imagine the Roman cavalry going into battle on child-sized mounts). It is very hard, though, to get as precise as we might like, even for humans. The fourth-century-CE Roman military writer Vegetius, for example, mentions (in his Book 1, Chapter 5) two heights for soldiers, measured in Roman “feet”: 6 feet and 5 feet 10 inches (the Roman “foot”, as a unit of measurement is slightly shorter than the modern one). But it is not clear why there are two different heights given here, which classes of soldier they apply to, at what period, or even if Vegetius is really talking about enforced minimum requirements. If he is, to judge from soldiers’ skeletons, plenty of men were in practice let in without meeting those requirements.
But this is where the shoes, newly discovered at the fort of Magna on Hadrian’s Wall, are a surprise. Leather shoes on Hadrian’s Wall have been some of the most interesting finds over the past few decades, indicating for example that some of these army bases were home to women and children, as well as to squaddies. Even the men’s footwear, though, has been smaller than you would expect for the average modern soldier (commonly around UK size 7 or 8). Contrast some of the finds at Magna: eight of the shoes unearthed there have been more than 30 centimetres long (that is UK size 13+ or European size 46+). Huge, in other words.
There has been some speculation about whether a group of unusually large-footed (and no doubt tall) soldiers were based here, perhaps recruited from a particularly large-footed community somewhere in the Roman empire. That’s obviously possible, but it doesn’t seem very likely to me. Another idea is that these shoes might actually be specialist footwear of some sort: a kind of snowshoe, perhaps, intended to have at least two thick layers of sock inside, and so adding several shoe sizes onto the foot of the wearer. Or possibly something medical? That seems more plausible to me than a group of (relative) giants.
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