Social Networks and Interconnections in Ancient and Medieval Contexts

In order to reconstruct social networks for the early medieval period - whether friendship or patronage networks, or teacher-student relationships - scholars typically mine surviving letters and letter collections. While the information gleaned from letters is undoubtedly important, what survives from the early Middle Ages is patchy. Further, analysis of the networks we reconstruct from this data are all too often divorced from any material or geographical reality.

In this paper I employ social network analysis to study female agency in the late Roman republican period. My project uses female centred networks to connect women, and men, during this period as visualisation enables an easier identification of different patterns of connectedness, whether they be social, familial and/or political.

My overarching project aims to examine conceptions of the ancient Romans’ highest deity, Jupiter, in Italy during the Imperial period by tracing the networks involved in transmitting components of the worship experience of the god including epithets employed, the purpose for invoking the deity, as well as how the god was propitiated. Here, network analysis is applied to various types of material and inscriptional data as a proxy for studying the transmission and distribution of ideas about the god in Roman Imperial Italy.

Hellenistic proxenia decrees from the island of Samothrace offer a case study in the challenges as well as the potential for network analysis to blend qualitative and quantitative data, bridge civic practice and ritual promises, and make productive use of non-Mediterranean comparanda. Samothrace is as rich in proxenic inscriptions as the granting city is under-explored archaeologically and poorly attested in historical documents. Excavations on the island have focused on the sanctuary of the mystery cult, positioned just outside the city walls.

In the span of a century, the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon grew from a single city to ruling over the majority of Western Anatolia, attaining a remarkable legacy as patrons of the Greek world in the process. Gruen ascribed their success precisely to that patronage (“Culture as Policy: The Attalids of Pergamon” ([UC Press 2000] 17-31). An extensive series of benefactions and euergetistic interventions defined Attalid foreign policy. Network analysis is a powerful tool to visualize these varied benefactions of statues, buildings, financial contributions, and other gifts.

Social network analysis (SNA), a quantitative method used in the social sciences since the 1940s, is deployed by an increasing number of scholars to visualize and analyze interconnections in the ancient world. Data sets both textual and material support analyses that bring together in a shared methodology such diverse cultural entities as correspondence, civic institutions, trade in raw materials, political and philosophical affiliations, finely crafted goods and ritual practices.