Greek and Roman Networks in the Mediterranean

Irad Malkin, Christy Constantakopoulou, Katerina Panagopoulou, Irad Malkin, Christy Constantakopoulou, Katerina Panagopoulou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317991137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

How useful is the concept of "network" for historical studies and the ancient world in particular? Using theoretical models of social network analysis, this book illuminates aspects of the economic, social, religious, and political history of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

Bringing together some of the most active and prominent researchers in ancient history, this book moves beyond political institutions, ethnic, and geographical boundaries in order to observe the ancient Mediterranean through a perspective of network interaction. It employs a wide range of approaches, and to examine relationships and interactions among various social entities in the Mediterranean. Chronologically, the book extends from the early Iron Age to the late Antique world, covering the Mediterranean between Antioch in the east to Massalia (Marseilles) in the west.

This book was published as two special issues in Mediterranean Historical Review.

Beyond and Below the Polis: Networks, Associations, and the Writing of Greek History

Kostas Vlassopoulos

The study of Greek history in the last few decades has been dominated by the concept of the polis. This trend has taken two separate, but closely connected, forms. On the micro-level, the view of the polis as an adult male citizen club tends to emphasize a number of insuperable polarities as fundamental features of Greek social, economic, political, and cultural history: citizen vs. foreigner, male vs. female, free vs. slave, Greek vs. barbarian.¹ On the macro-level, the concept itself of the Greek polis came ultimately to play the role of the subject of Greek history. The polis was and is still seen as the Greek form of state, the Greek form of society, the Greek form of economy; and as such was what separated the Greeks from the other peoples of the Mediterranean and the Near East, thereby allowing modern scholars to focus on specifically Greek economic, social, cultural, and political history. The many different Greek communities, scattered all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, could be seen as so many different replicas of the common denominator. And instead of the bewildering variety between the developments of different Greek communities, modern scholars could substitute a unified history based on the rise, acme, and decline of the polis.

Two main problems arise with this standard approach. The first is that, in an age of disillusionment with structuralism, the static polarities seem particularly problematic.² But the more important problem is the inability of the polis concept to explain both the wide diversity and the fascinating unity of the Greek world.³ We have no analytical standpoint apart from the level of the polis to understand the Greek world as a whole.⁴ Instead, we accept the wider Greek world as a matter of fact; in this framework, everybody who spoke Greek is considered somehow part of Greek culture and civilization. The assumption behind this approach is that culture and society are closed, homogeneous, bounded entities. Greek culture is understood as a closed, bounded entity juxtaposed to other closed, bounded entities. This has also created problematic reifications: Greek history is written as a national history, and is separated from other national histories in the Mediterranean (e.g., Egyptian or Persian). Even when scholars take into account the interactions between Greeks and other peoples, they tend to understand this as an interaction between two closed, bounded entities.⁵

What I wish to propose in this paper is that the concept of network can allow us to move beyond this orthodox model of writing Greek history⁶ The concept of network enables us to explore two levels apart from the polis; the level of social, economic, political, and cultural interaction below the polis, and the level beyond. I will propose that in order to study the networks below the polis, we need to employ the concept of koinônia (association); and that in order to study networks beyond the polis, we need to employ the concept of the world-system.

Below the Polis: The Koinôniai

Networks are processes that connect people and places in order to move goods, people and ideas/technologies. But how do they actually work at a micro-level? Networks function by bringing people into association with each other, in order to buy and sell, to work, to drink and eat, to participate in worship, to discuss, to fight, to travel, etc. This concept of association plays a fundamental role in the work of Aristotle, who sees the polis as a koinônia encompassing other koinôniai:⁷

But all koinôniai are parts, as it were, of the koinônia of the polis. Travellers for instance associate together for some advantage, namely to procure some of their necessary supplies. But the politikê koinônia too, it is believed, was originally formed, and continues to be maintained, for the advantage of its members. … Thus the other koinôniai aim at some particular advantage; for example, sailors combine to seek the profits of seafaring in the way of trade or the like; comrades in arms the gains of warfare, their aim being either plunder or victory over the enemy, or the capture of a city. … All these koinôniai then appear to be parts of the koinônia of the polis.⁸

Of course an association can take an institutional form, like a deme (township), or a tribe; but there are many other koinôniai, ranging from the temporary and the informal, to the highly institutionalized. It is regrettable that modern historians have not paid enough attention to this Aristotelian concept, as it offers a number of great advantages.⁹ The first advantage of the concept of koinônia is its ability to overcome static polarities and divisions, such as those between masters and slaves, citizens and metics (alien residents), men and women, Greeks and barbarians. Of course, these distinctions did exist and they did play an important role; but the problem is that we have made of them unsurpassable states of being, when in reality these concepts are images and identities that are defined by constant challenge and renegotiation, depending on the context.¹⁰ The advantage of Aristotle’s concept, then, is that it allows us to focus on the concrete experience of people in the various forms of koinôniai in which they associate. In the case of the Greek and barbarian identities, what is the actual form of such a polarity when they both participate in a koinônia aboard a ship? And what happens when a free man and a slave both participate in a koinônia for work (in the shipyards, for instance), under the same conditions? What occurs when a citizen and a metic drink together and converse in a tavern or a barber’s shop? And last but not least, what takes place when men and women participate together in a koinônia of religious practice?

A further advantage of Aristotle’s koinônia is its conceptual flexibility. In contrast with the modern conception of isomorphism between society, economy, and the state, the concept of koinôniai recognizes that the boundaries of different koinôniai are different, and not necessarily overlapping. The boundaries identifying a household, for instance, are very different from those of guest-friendship, or for a trading agreement, a religious or scholarly community, or a group of systratiôtai (military comrades). All these relationships, which are described as koinôniai by Aristotle, are part of the politikê koinônia, but each one has its own boundaries, directions, and rhythms of change.

Let us look at a number of examples that show the value of the concept of koinônia. I will restrict my examples to cases of koinôniai between Greeks and foreigners. Much has been written about the Greeks’ perceptions of the Other, their racism, and their contempt for Barbarians.¹¹ While of course there is a lot of truth in these accounts, it seems to me that these issues are rarely discussed with real people in mind, nor are they subjected to the sort of analysis that historians with better evidence are accustomed to applying.

Let us imagine a Greek and a Phoenician drinking a cup of wine after work in Piraeus, and that the former is Athenian: how would he formulate his discussion on the superiority of Athenian democracy over Oriental despotism, and what would the Phoenician reply? Would the Greek speak to the Phoenician in the same way as he would with other Greeks? How would his personal, daily contact with the Phoenician influence his own perceptions? Given that in Piraeus, Greek citizens and Phoenician aliens lived in the same neighbourhoods, worked in the same streets, buried their dead in the same graveyards, and their children played together—how did this day-to-day experience influence and formulate people’s perceptions in general?¹²

Although we do not have the direct evidence to answer these questions, nor do we have records of actual encounters and discussions, certain bits and pieces of evidence have survived that offer some clues. For example, an official Athenian inscription honouring the king of Phoenician Sidon also stipulates the following: ’Those Sidonians that while residing in Sidon and having political rights there (politeuomenoi) come to Athens for trade should be exempt from the metoikion tax, from acting as choregoi and from being registered for an eisphora.’¹³ The Athenians in this inscription recognize that, while a Near Eastern community might be governed by a king, its citizens were not without some political rights.¹⁴ So our Phoenician might argue that the Athenians themselves recognized that the commonly held idea of Oriental despotism was far from the actual reality. How did the Athenians know that some Sidonians had political rights in Sidon? Surely, the Greek discourses on Oriental despotism that we find in Greek texts did not provide them with the material to raise such a possibility. Is not this inscription a result of these actual encounters that I am postulating?

Further evidence is found in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, in which Ischomachus describes the following encounter:

Once I had an opportunity of looking over the great Phoenician merchantman, Socrates, and I thought I had never seen tackle so excellently and accurately arranged. For I never saw so many bits of stuff packed away separately in so small a receptacle. … I found that the steersman’s servant, who is called the mate, knows each particular section so exactly that he can tell, even when away, where everything is kept and how much there is of it, just as well as a man who knows how to spell can tell how many letters there are in Socrates and in what order they come. Now, I saw this man in his spare time inspecting all the stores that are wanted, as a matter of course, in the ship. I was surprised to see him looking over them, and asked what he was doing. ‘Sir,’ he answered, ’I am looking to see how the ship’s tackle is stored, in case of accident, or whether anything is missing, or mixed up with other stuff. For when God sends a storm at sea, there’s no time to search about for what you want, or to serve it out if it’s in a muddle. For God threatens and punishes careless fellows, and you’re lucky if he merely refrains from destroying the innocent; and if he saves you when you do your work well, you have much cause to thank heaven for.’¹⁵

Ischomachus (or Xenophon) was clearly impressed by the huge Phoenician vessel; from the detailed way it is described one can easily assume that the event was well remembered. So intrigued was Ischomachus that he went deliberately to make inquiries with the mate of the Phoenician ship, and one wonders in which language Xenophon believed them to have conversed: did Ischomachus speak Phoenician, or did the Phoenician sailor speak Greek? Were there also Greek sailors aboard the Phoenician ship? And what else can the two men have talked about? Clearly, after such a detailed conversation, no Greek would continue to sustain the view of Barbarian inferiority or incapacity.

Another fascinating example occurs in the account of Athenogenes, an Egyptian metic involved in selling perfumes in late fourth-century Athens.¹⁶ The cunning Athenogenes conspires with Antigone, a prostitute, to sell to a wealthy young Athenian citizen two male slaves along with their heavily indebted perfume workshop. In this case, the presumed superiority of the dominant Greek citizen is completely subverted. Although the details of the story are not of direct concern here, what happens later on is qui...