A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean

by Irad Malkin

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 mother cities were numerous and the new settlements ("colonies") would often engender more settlements. The "Greek center" was at sea; it was formed through back-ripple effects 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 like the Etruscans, Iberians, Scythians, or Libyans. The contrast between "center and periphery" hardly mattered (all was peri-, "around"), nor was a bi-polar
contrast with Barbarians of much significance.
Should we admire the Greeks for having created their civilization in spite of the enormous distances and discontinuous territories separating their independent communities? Or did the salient aspects of their civilization form and crystallize because of its architecture as a de-centralized network? This book claims that the answer lies in network attributes shaping a "Small Greek World," where separation is measured by degrees of contact rather than by physical dimensions.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

306 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2011

Reviews

[Gary Reger · Rating 5 out of 5]

In A Small Greek World Irad Malkin has taken an interest Greek and Roman historians had been pursuing for a couple of decades in network theory and used it to articulate a full-blown model of the Archaic (and to a lesser degree Classical) Mediterranean world as a proliferation of nodes and hubs, interconnected by religion, trade, and politics. Since its publication in 2011, A Small Greek World has established itself as essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the Greek Mediterranean came about.

Put simply, network theory is a way of seeing how units, called nodes, link up, transferring information, people, goods, whatever. Some nodes become "super nodes," that is, "hubs," which attract an abundance of connections and become the points through which whatever is transferred preferentially travels.

This model coheres nicely in many ways with the Mediterranean world articulated in Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purchell's The Corrupting Sea (2000), which posited that world as a series of small, interlinked "microregions." Malkin's contribution shows how such a model could come into being and what factors caused and sustained it.

These factors include particularly the foundation of "colonies" (apoikiai) in the eighth through fifth centuries BCE and the spread of cult across the space. He looks notably at Greek colonies on Sicily and the role of Apollo. His arguments are wholly convincing.

It was wrong of me to write "Greek Mediterranean" above, because Malkin is very much alive to the participation of many other peoples, especially Phoenicians and Etruscans, in the system.

Simply put, A Small Greek World is essential reading for every Greek (and Roman) historian.