Benjamin Winnick (University of British Columbia)
The Arcadian Federation’s synoecism of Megalopolis in 370 or 368 BCE transformed 1500 km2 of Southwestern Arcadia from an area dominated by tribal states (ethnoi) and small poleis into a single polis state (Nielsen). This event appears in the textual record in Pausanias 8.27 and Diodorus 15.72. In this paper, I apply social network analysis (SNA) to the mythic genealogies of Arcadia to determine whether this entire territory was incorporated into Megalopolis at once or over a long period of time. In this way, I demonstrate the usefulness of this methodology to the study of ancient history.
Roy sees Pausanias’ list of 41 incorporated communities as the initial plan for the synoecism that was implemented in 368 BCE and stabilized after a rebellion in 361 BCE (Roy, Nielsen). Moggi, meanwhile, believes that the synoecism initially only incorporated the 20 Parrhasian and Maenalian communities that Diodorus mentions. According to him, Pausanias’ list represents the result of Megalopolis’ gradual expansion (Moggi, Nielsen).
In this paper, I re-examine this question by arranging the characters of Pausanias’ account of Arcadian mythology into a social network. The network component associated with the region incorporated into Megalopolis seems like the product of an abrupt and drastic rearrangement of the region’s ethnic and religious identity (Paus 8.2-3). This supports Roy’s theory of “an ambitious but unstable synoecism” in 368 BCE rather than Moggi’s theory of “an initially limited but expanding synoecism,” from c. 370 to 200 BCE (Nielsen, Roy, Moggi).
Most of Arcadia’s mythic genealogy appears like an organic expression of regional identity. The regional eponym Arcas has tribal eponyms like Azan and Apheidas as his children and their descendants are connected to settlements, religious sanctuaries, and geographic features within their tribal territory. Genealogical branches are complex and appear to be the result of centuries of territorial and ethnic negotiations.
The genealogies connected to Southwestern Arcadia are more simplistic. Tribal eponyms are notably absent from Southwest Arcadia even though tribal states (ethnoi) had dominated the region before the synoecism and contributed the bulk of settlements to Megalopolis (Nielsen). Instead, Pausanias frames Southwest Arcadia as a series of individual settlements whose eponymous founders had few genealogical connections beyond their father, King Lykaion, the eponym of the religious center of Megalopolis, Mt. Lykaion. Such an imbalance between the connectivity of one network node (Lykaion) and its adjacent nodes (Lykaion’s sons) is a sign of an artificial network (Kenna and MacCarron, Newman and Park).
Thus, the uniqueness of Southwest Arcadia’s mythic genealogies implies a drastic and imposed erasure and rearrangement of the region’s religious and ethnic identity, which corresponds to Roy’s argument that the Arcadian League intended Megalopolis to encompass all Southwest Arcadia at its inception although some communities resisted this plan. If Megalopolis had grown gradually, as Moggi suggests, the mythic heroes of Southwest Arcadia would have retained more of a presence in Arcadian mythology instead of just being sons of Lykaion.