Sam McHarg ('Wake up, letters February 23) may have had a glitch in his keyboard when he said "Aotearoa has a larger population now than the Roman Empire had at its most powerful".
Authorities on the demographics of the Roman Empire are agreed that at itspeak it had a population of over 60 million (KJ Beloch, Frier et al), a cohort somewhat greater than here.
Rather, your correspondent may have had in mind a census taken in 28 BC by Caesar Augustus, resulting in over four million, but the interpretation of such is controversial - was it of Roman citizens only (in which case a sizeable number of subjects were omitted from the court), and did it encompass the whole of the empire?
Whatever we can lay claim to, having a population greater than the Roman Empire is not one of them.
