A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean by Irad Malkin (review)
- A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean by Irad Malkin
My visceral reaction on reading this book was to recall Virgil’s line Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem (“the only hope for the conquered is to hope for no hope”). But it turns out that computer science, colonization, glial neuronal pathways, and ancient Greek identity formation have more in common than you thought—namely, that they can all be illuminated by network theory, which, Malkin argues, explains the rise of “Hellenicity” better than traditional explanations focused on the “Greek/barbarian” dichotomy. A Small Greek World marries Braudel with randomly proliferating connectivity, with “ties,” “flows,” and the “Greek Wide Web,” in order to produce, well, far-reaching and interconnected (but never arbitrary) results. The circulation of socially constructed, contested, [End Page 495] and revisable “knowledge” manufactured Greek identity as (or even because) Greeks kept moving ever farther apart in space. Even if Platonic “knowledge” is set over that which simply and unchangingly is, Plato’s more lasting contribution was to point out that the Greeks themselves knew only the life of restless and talkative frogs chirping around the pond. Malkin explains why their very degrees of separation brought them together.
Ryan Balot is professor of political science and classics at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens, Greek Political Thought, and Courage and Its Critics in Democratic Athens (forthcoming), as well as editor of the Blackwell’s Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought.
