On occasion I’ll stumble into a conversation about life expectancy. Almost invariably, someone is suggesting that humans are living so much longer today than they once did at such and such a time. Since I’m particularly interested in Roman/Celtic times, as well as the period of the American Revolution I’ve often been puzzled by these statements because so many of the characters I’ve read about seem to have lived to a great age. At issue seems to be a mis-application of the facts of statistics.

Do a quick search on the internet and you’ll find that the life expectancy in ancient Rome was about 28 years. This does not mean that if you were 27 years old in ancient Rome that you were a wizened old man (which seems to be the prevailing opinion in the discussions I’ve been in), but instead indicates your average *chance* to survive when you count all the infant deaths (a huge mortality percentage - perhaps as high as 50%)! Sure there were other factors - poor diet and higher risk of death from disease, but it doesn’t mean that man was physically any different than today. If you lived as a Roman citizen in Rome and had a good standard of living, chances are good you’d live just as long as the typical American today. However, even if you were a rich Roman, the medicine of the time couldn’t do a thing about many of the serious medical conditions we routinely correct in neo-natal hospitals today or the not so serious conditions we routinely have corrected in old age, so many of the unfortunate infants would simply die, and some of the elderly would succumb earlier than we might expect today which skews the statistics greatly. Things don’t look much better for the late 1700s America, with estimated life expectancies of 35 to 40 years. I’ve read that infant mortality during that period could have been as high as a possible 30 to 40%! If you managed to make it adulthood, chances were good you would live a fairly long time because the American diet was excellent compared with that of old England (according to William Fogel British men had a 17 year shorter life expectancy due to inadequate diet).

So it depends on what you mean when you say we live longer. If you mean an average of the entire society including infants, you’re right - modern medicine has worked wonders to help keep infants alive, and reduce the ravages of disease. If you mean a particular modern individual person will live longer than his ancient counterpart, then depending on which individuals you are comparing and what their individual circumstances are you might be wrong.

Here’s a totally random list of ages I looked up just for kicks:

• Julius Ceasar died at only 56 (but he was assassinated)
• Augustus Ceasar - 76
• Tiberius Ceasar - 78
• George Washington - 67
• John Adams was 90
• Thomas Jefferson - 83