Introduction

As yet, fertility in the ancient world has not received full attention from a behavioural perspective. This paper adds to recent attempts to put our understanding of childbearing in the ancient world into a wider theoretical perspective. It aims to re-evaluate the hypothesis of the occurrence of a fertility decline in Roman republican Italy with the help of demographic theory.

The theory concerning fertility behaviour during the late Roman republic that has been put forward previously by Brunt depends largely on an argument of economic rationality. As poverty rendered childbearing irrational from an economic perspective, a fertility decline would have set in on the Italian peninsula. However, while Brunt’s population development scenario is still influential among republican historians, traditional rational choice theory (RCT) – which originates from the discipline of economics and assumes that human behaviour is the result of decisions made by rational preference ranking – has long come under fire. The shortcomings of RCT have been revealed by experimental economics and game theory, and have affected a wide range of disciplines. It is now widely accepted that decision-making processes are embedded in specific cultural and social settings that affect outcomes through the creation or upholding of practical, structural, normative and/or perceived constraints.