A small Greek world: networks in the Ancient Mediterranean

Greek civilization and identity crystallized not when Greeks were close together but when they came to be far apart. It emerged during the Archaic period, when Greeks founded coastal city-states and trading stations in ever-widening horizons from the Ukraine to Spain. No center directed their diffusion, and the settlements ("colonies") originated from a multitude of mother cities. The "Greek center" was virtual, at sea, created as a back-ripple effect of cultural convergence following the physical divergence of independent settlements. "The shores of Greece are like hems stitched onto the lands of Barbarian peoples" (Cicero). Overall and regardless of distance, settlement practices became Greek in the making, and Greek communities far more resembled each other than any of their particular neighbors, such as the Etruscans, Iberians, Scythians, or Libyans. The contrast between "center and periphery" hardly mattered (all was peri-, "around), nor was a bipolar contrast with barbarians of much significance. Rather, not only did Greek civilization constitute a decentralized network, but it also emerged, so this book claims, owing to its network attributes. Following a section on networks and history, it demonstrates its approach through case studies involving Rhodes, Sicily, the Far West (Phokaians), and the Phoenicians. The book concludes that it was a network dynamics of small worlds that rapidly foreshortened connectivity and multiplied links and hubs, thus allowing the flows of civilizational content and self-aware notions of identity to overlap and proliferate. Drawing on Mediterranean studies, ancient history, archeology, and network theory (especially in physics and sociology), this book offers a novel approach to historical interpretation.