Do We Live Longer Than The Romans?

Of course we live longer than the Romans on average. Back in 1900, global life expectancy (the average age to which a human can expect to live) was just 32, while European and American life expectancy was around 42 – roughly half of what it is today. Estimates put life expectancy in Ancient Rome at around 35 years. However, life expectancy doesn’t tell the whole story, and the source of the life expectancy that we have gained as a result of modern medicine might just change the way you view human longevity.

When looking at the numbers, one might imagine that a Roman would be awestruck to learn that living past 80 would one day be fairly common. After all, their life expectancy was only 35, so anyone older than that would surely be considered to be ‘old’, having passed average lifespan and expecting to die fairly soon. Someone who had reached the age of 80 – over twice the average – would be considered by the Romans to be truly ancient, while living to the age of 100 would be practically unthinkable.

Of course, this isn’t how life expectancy works – in fact, life expectancy doesn’t actually mean very much in terms of what age is considered ‘old’. As an average, life expectancy is calculated by adding up everyone’s lifespan and dividing this number by the number of people. This means that if one in two Romans died before the age of 1, but everyone else lived to the age of 70, then the average life expectancy would only be 35. This wouldn’t make living past 35 impressive – anyone who survived their first year of life would still be expected to live to 70. Early deaths have a significant impact on average life expectancy, and boy did the Romans have a lot of early deaths. Most of these deaths would have been children dying as a result of infectious diseases, or babies lost to complications during birth. Even if you did make it until adulthood, you still weren’t entirely in the clear as you had a reasonably high risk of dying violently.

Over the last 100 years or so, these causes of death have largely been eliminated. Improved sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics and other medical innovations have substantially reduced the risk of deadly infectious disease and infant mortality, meaning that age-related diseases are now the predominant cause of death for most of the world. The extent of the impact of this can be seen in the graph below. If you selected a random group of newborns in 1851 and followed them until death, a third of them would already be dead by the time 20 years had passed. If you did the same thing for people born in 2011, we expect it to take around 80 years for a third of them to die.

This is certainly not the only reason that human life expectancy has improved – you can see from the graph that modern medicine has also allowed people to survive longer once they reach adulthood and old age. Four fifths of people born in 2011 can expect to live past 73, compared to only one fifth in 1851. This is slightly less impressive when you consider that around a third of those born in 1851 had already died by their 20th birthday. Taking this into consideration, around 30% of people who survived their 20th birthday would also survive their 73rd.

This starts to give us a clearer idea of what longevity was like before modern medicine and sanitation. Childhood was a dangerous phase of life, but among adults, 70 and 80 year-olds were not exceptionally rare. Based on the available historical records, this appears to have been the case even as far back as the Romans – in fact, the Romans probably lived slightly longer than those people in the 1800s, partly because the population centres of the ancient world were less dense and therefore less susceptible to plague. One study estimated that of those born before 100BC, half were able to live to the age of 72 as long as they didn’t die violently first (of course, this was limited to those important enough to have their deaths recorded, so they would have been wealthier and healthier than most).

OK, so reaching an age we currently consider to be ‘old’ would not have been as impressive in ancient Rome as one might initially assume. But what about the extremes of age? Was living to age 100 and beyond possible 2000+ years ago, or were medical advances necessary to push the boundaries of human lifespan? In The Natural History, Roman author Pliny the Elder describes multiple individuals who lived past age 100, including one woman named Clodia who lived to be 115. Such individuals would certainly have been less common than they are today, but they did exist, and probably always have.

Why humans have evolved to be capable of living this long when average lifespan is so much shorter is a fascinating topic, but one for another day. What we can say is that there’s no good evidence that the maximum lifespan to which humans are capable of living has ever increased. From what we can tell, there is a lifespan limit set by biology of around 120 years, and it’s simply a question of whether something else cuts your life short before then. If the same types of medical improvements continue to be made, we would expect to see a larger and larger number of people reaching these advanced ages, but we will never see someone live to be 200, nor will being 100 years old feel any better. For that, we will almost certainly need new kinds of medical advances that slow down the biology of ageing.