reply to this objection seems absurd—that the rubbish would sink sixty or seventy feet below ground. It appears from Spartian (in vita Severi) that the five-mile stone in via Lavicana was out of the city. (7) Olympiodorus and Publius Victor fix the number of houses in Rome to be between forty and fifty thousand. (8) The very extravagance of the consequences drawn by this critic, as well as Lipsius, if they be necessary, destroys the foundation on which they are grounded—that Rome contained fourteen millions of inhabitants, while the whole kingdom of France contains only five, according to his computation, etc.
The only objection to the sense which we have affixed above to the passage of Pliny seems to lie in this, that Pliny, after mentioning the thirty-seven gates of Rome, assigns only a reason for suppressing the seven old ones, and says nothing of the eighteen gates, the streets leading from which terminated, according to my opinion, before they reached the Forum. But as Pliny was writing to the Romans, who perfectly knew the disposition of the streets, it is not strange he should take a circumstance for granted which was so familiar to everybody. Perhaps, too, many of these gates led to wharves upon the river.
So also in lib. i. Satyr. 8—
We may remark that the numbers in Cæsar’s commentaries can be more depended on than those of any other ancient author, because of the Greek translation which still remains, and which checks the Latin original.
It is remarkable that though Diodorus Siculus makes the inhabitants of Egypt, when conquered by the Romans, amount only to three millions, yet Josephus (De bello Jud., lib. 2, cap. 16) says that its inhabitants, excluding those of Alexandria, were seven millions and a half in the reign of Nero, and he expressly says that he drew this account from the books of the