Soldier Mobility in the Roman Empire from Birth-to-Death Locations in Latin Epigraphs

Preprint (version 1, 23 October 2026). Authors' revised version of a chapter submitted for publication in an edited volume. Quantifying how far and how often people moved in the past is central to understanding the economic and cultural integration of pre-industrial empires, yet historical mobility remains poorly documented. This paper reconstructs birth-to-death mobility in the Roman Empire from Latin inscriptions. Starting from the 93,646 individuals in the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH) People dataset, we extract the 2,672 persons (c. 3%) who declare their geographic origin (origo), geocode these declarations semi-automatically, and combine them with the findspots of the inscriptions as proxies for place of birth and place of death. For the 2,313 geocoded migrants we calculate great-circle distances, assign birth and death provinces, and track movement by century between 50 BC and AD 500. Migrants are overwhelmingly military men (85% of those with a declared status); women make up only 6%. The median birth-to-death distance is 626 km (mean 827 km): relocations of 100–500 km dominate, with a long tail reaching beyond 3,000 km. The volume and cumulative distance of movement rise twenty-fold in the first century AD, plateau in the second, halve in the third, and collapse from the fourth century onwards. Migrants originate mainly in the core provinces (Baetica, Venetia and Histria, Hispania Citerior) and die along the European frontier (Germania Superior, Dalmatia, Pannonia Superior, Moesia Superior), while Rome is conspicuously under-represented. We discuss the biases of epigraphic commemoration and argue that the volume and reach of attested migration offer a proxy for the economic vibrancy and connectivity of the Roman Mediterranean. Data: origo dataset, doi:10.5281/zenodo.14604222. Code: github.com/sdam-au/LI_origo (to be made public upon publication of the chapter).