Colin Peter McEvedy, ‘psychiatrist, historian, demographer and polymath’ as the Independent later described him, was born in Salford, Lancashire, on 6 June 1930, the second son of a surgeon. His father sent him to Harrow, where he fell in love with jazz and ancient history and won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. There he read Medicine and kept a pet python.
Although history remained his great intellectual passion, McEvedy met family expectations and joined his two brothers in the medical profession. In fact, he achieved a certain degree of notoriety as a psychiatrist. In 1970, while at the Middlesex Hospital, he co-authored two controversial papers on a mysterious epidemic which, fifteen years earlier, had overtaken 300 of the live-in nursing staff at the Royal Free Hospital. Not a single patient was affected, and no causative organism was ever found. The condition had been ascribed to a benign form of encephalomyelitis. McEvedy argued persuasively that it was an epidemic of conversion hysteria triggered by fear of contracting polio. This was not kindly received by the medical profession, and something of a rumpus followed. In 1972 he was appointed Consultant Psychiatrist to Ealing Hospital, where he helped to design a new acute unit in which each patient had an individual room.
As it turned out, Colin McEvedy became much better known as the author of more than half a dozen historical atlases, most of which remain in print. These atlases, illustrated with his own (originally hand-drawn) maps, were translated into many languages and enjoyed by historians and teachers as well as the common reader.
In 1978 McEvedy with Richard Jones published an Atlas of World Population History, reflecting his long-time interest in the growth and shifting of populations. He next conceived an atlas with separate entries on every city in the Roman Empire that ever achieved a population of at least 10,000 persons. His idea was to accompany each historical summary by a map, and each map would be drawn to a common scale. This unprecedented approach would allow readers to readily grasp the differences in size between the various cities being considered. At the time of his death, McEvedy was nearing completion of this, in many ways his most ambitious, undertaking, one that he often despaired of finishing and several times put aside, only to take up again.
The development of this atlas was a task of many years, and drew on an enormous number of reference materials, some quite rare and others never translated into English. In researching it, McEvedy had the advantage of his own extensive library; he also spent hundreds of hours delving through infrequently disturbed shelves in the London Library. In his last years he became devoted to the more specialized shelves of the Classics Library at Senate House.
Over time, McEvedy’s ambitious design for the book expanded. He added some smaller towns that he thought would be of interest to general readers, even though they didn’t meet his initial criterion of 10,000 inhabitants. He also attempted to estimate the populations of each city, based on combining written historical sources with knowledge of the areas enclosed by each city’s walls. McEvedy was on the conservative side in his population estimates, arguing that many other modern historians had inferred unreasonably high population densities in ancient cities. As a skilled synthesizer of complex information, he explained his reasoning clearly and convincingly.
As a starting point for his population estimates, McEvedy typically looks at the fragmentary ancient sources. For example, in his chapter on Alexandria, he begins with a census of buildings that dates from the third or fourth century AD. He also considers (e.g. at pages 14 and 51) the fact that many citizens of ancient city-states often lived outside the city walls. His population figures for Athens derive in part from Herodotus’ estimate of freeborn males that probably reflects a census of the late sixth century BC. For Constantinople, he begins with known information about the number of Roman wheat rations that were available to be diverted from Egypt in the early fourth century AD. For Rome, he triangulates between several bits of information, including a fourth-century survey of houses and the recorded wheat rations in earlier reigns. McEvedy extrapolates the available data on a few cities to the larger number of communities for which no ancient population records survive, blending his knowledge about the areas enclosed by city walls and the portions of each site that were actually inhabited with archaeological evidence of changes in density of residential architecture over time. He also considers the major reductions in population resulting from wars and plagues, which he discusses in a number of entries. The credibility of McEvedy’s population estimates is attested to by the success of his groundbreaking Atlas of World Population History (1978). In June 2001, he was honoured in Florence, Italy, when the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population invited him to speak at its conference ‘History of World Population in the Second Millennium’. The IUSSP report of those proceedings referred to McEvedy’s population atlas as an ‘oft-quoted’ reference.
Although McEvedy’s researches and maps obviously reflect the work of many other historians and archaeologists, it would be wrong to treat his scholarship as entirely secondary. He visited most of the listed cities himself and took pleasure in tracing the topography and ruined walls at each location. In 1996 I was fortunate enough to accompany McEvedy on a driving tour that included the Thracian town of Perinthos. More than one local inhabitant with a home abutting the old city wall was surprised that day to look up and see a determined Englishman in a dark-grey pin-striped suit walking along the top of the wall in an effort to measure its proper dimensions.
I first met Colin McEvedy in the mid 1980s, at the ruins of ancient Aphrodisias in Turkey. I was slowly ascending the cavea of the Roman theatre while he was leading his family up the other side of the same monument. The white marble steps reflected the rays of the hot summer sun, and Colin’s wife Sarah could be heard suggesting that the day’s quota of ancient ruins might already have been satisfied. When we met at the top of the theatre, the two parties of English-speaking visitors introduced themselves, and it turned out that we were all staying at hotels amid the ancient ruins at Hierapolis. A dinner that evening blossomed into a twenty-year friendship that included many visits and history-laden conversations.
At the time of his death on 1 August 2005, most of McEvedy’s city histories were stored on an early-model Macintosh desktop computer from which they proved rather difficult to retrieve. His hand-drawn maps were distributed through stacks of neatly organized folders, where his extensive notes testified to the diligence of his research. The fate of the atlas remained uncertain for some time, primarily because the author was unavailable to tie together the last loose ends. There was a renewed incentive to do so, however, when Penguin offered to publish the book. Some city maps required a little editing to supplement the rough sketches that remained in McEvedy’s files, and the reader will still find a few gaps in the text (several cities lack an estimate of the ancient population). It also seems that the author intended to summarize the populations of all the cities on some kind of combined historical graph, but that task was never finished. The book was, however, otherwise close to completion, and readers familiar with McEvedy’s brisk and sometimes irreverent style will discover a text consistent with the high standard set in his earlier historical atlases.
Although many will no doubt consult this atlas only in connection with a few cities in which they have a particular interest, it offers additional value to those who find time to read it from cover to cover, as the entries paint a colourful and comprehensive picture of the phases in which ancient cities typically grew (and in many cases declined) across the wide expanse of the Roman Empire. The entries also explain the origins of many well-known place names. There are a number of common themes, but there are also many unique factors that influenced the rise and fall of individual communities, and which help to explain their subsequent rebuilding or abandonment in modern times.
As well as offering a concise introduction to 120 ancient cities, this atlas includes a useful list of further reading for those who are interested in a particular place. In a few instances, the author’s bibliography has been supplemented by adding significant works published since his death.
It is rare, perhaps, for a historian to act also as his own cartographer, allowing him to coordinate his maps with the points emphasized in his text. It is even more unusual for a historian to have substantial expertise as a demographer, an essential qualification for producing this work. Moreover, in a time when academic specialization often favours the publication of monographs on narrow historical topics, McEvedy had a rare ability to condense and summarize a vast range of political, military, economic, architectural and cultural information into a text that the general reader can readily comprehend. Happily, he also approached his writing with balanced judgement and a subtle sense of humour. It was no coincidence that McEvedy’s historical atlases found a large audience and remain highly approachable introductions to history today.
In admiring McEvedy’s scholarship and the elegance of his writing, it would be unfortunate if we lost the memory of his engaging personality. McEvedy drew his maps in a basement office room at his home in Hammersmith, west London. There, his work table was often strewn with sketches and references being used to map the outlines of the particular city then occupying his interest. His sprawling library also included stacks of obscure site plans and brochures that he acquired on visiting the subject cities.
Although McEvedy was certainly able to concentrate on a narrow geographic location when his researches called for it, he remained an omnivorous reader. The broad learning that resulted enabled him to find topics of common interest with almost anyone with a lively mind, and helps to explain the remarkably diverse crowd of people who mixed together on the occasion of his wake. They shared memories of conversations in which McEvedy moved seamlessly from history to art to language to science, and even to the Formula 1 race results or the latest movies that had amused him.
McEvedy could hold forth with authority on almost any history-related topic, but he was also a good listener. He was entirely willing to question established opinions and seemed to enjoy testing new theories by sharing them with anyone who expressed interest. He was immensely learned but also genial and without a trace of condescension. He had a preternatural sense of time passing when away from his books, which made it difficult for him to suffer fools gladly. If he found himself in a place where he was unable to find intelligent conversation or someone to share his irreverent humour, he would sometimes slip away and return to his researches.
That humour was often revealed in the characteristically laconic postcards that he sent to friends while on his numerous travels. Once, when reporting that he had stopped for a picnic lunch in Greece, he simply wrote, ‘Et in Arcadia eggo.’ In the Acknowledgements at the end of his New Atlas of North American History, he wrote, ‘I must, however, acknowledge the support I have received from my publishers … my secretary, Sandra Cook, and from my wife and children. Particularly the latter, without whom this book would have been finished in half the time.’
Colin McEvedy’s three daughters, who have each inherited shares of his wonderful library, reflect in various ways their father’s love of art and history, and his tolerant view of the diverse world. This last atlas, which could never have been completed without their support, is a final gift to the readers who learned to value his succinct expositions on the complex threads from which our modern cities have woven their past.
Douglas Stuart Oles