Drawing on Mediterranean studies, ancient history, archeology, and network theory (especially in physics and sociology), this book offers a novel approach to historical interpretation. The book concludes that it was a network dynamics of small worlds that rapidly foreshortened connectivity and multiplied links and hubs, thus allowing the flows of civilizational content and self-aware notions of identity to overlap and proliferate. Following a section on networks and history, it demonstrates its approach through case studies involving Rhodes, Sicily, the Far West (Phokaians), and the Phoenicians. Rather, not only did Greek civilization constitute a decentralized network, but it also emerged, so this book claims, owing to its network attributes. The contrast between "center and periphery" hardly mattered (all was peri-, "around), nor was a bipolar contrast with barbarians of much significance. 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, such as the Etruscans, Iberians, Scythians, or Libyans. "The shores of Greece are like hems stitched onto the lands of Barbarian peoples" (Cicero). The "Greek center" was virtual, at sea, created as a back-ripple effect of cultural convergence following the physical divergence of independent settlements. No center directed their diffusion, and the settlements ("colonies") originated from a multitude of mother cities. It emerged during the Archaic period, when Greeks founded coastal city-states and trading stations in ever-widening horizons from the Ukraine to Spain. Greek civilization and identity crystallized not when Greeks were close together but when they came to be far apart. As John Boardman notes: “ith their colonizing trade in the west and the north, the Greeks made contact with people who were less advanced culturally, and technologically, and we are able to observe the beginnings of the spread of Greek civilization into Italy and western Europe, with benefits to be enjoyed by Rome and by all later western cultures.” In eastern Sicily, for example, where Greek settlement was most intense, archaeologists have pointed to the fact that the indigenous ‘Finocchito’ culture of the late eighth and early seventh centuries quickly comes to absorb Greek styles and modes of manufacture, thus marking a distinction from the more conservative ‘Sant’Angelo Muxaro’ culture of central and western Sicily. In the first model, the cultural traditions of the Greek mainland are transplanted to the west with the first settlers, where they inundate a generally passive indigenous population that is thereby ‘Hellenized’. Previous scholarship on the early Greek settlements in the west has, for the most part, been written according to the assumptions of one of three models. This chapter attempts to lay out some groundwork for that question by focusing on the nature and historical context of early Greek settlements in Sicily and South Italy – on what is often (though somewhat misleadingly) called the ‘colonial’ background.
1448a32) is right that the Sicilian comic poet Epicharmus was “much earlier than Chionides and Magnes” and if Epicharmus’ comedies have left their mark on those of Aristophanes, then there is the real possibility that the Sicilian genre influenced its Attic counterpart, which then raises the intriguing question as to whether the origins of Greek drama should be sought – at least in part – in the west. After all, Aeschylus is said to have paid two visits to Sicily, supposedly meeting an unlucky end at Gela. Faced with the fact that a thriving theatrical culture existed in fifth- and fourth-century Sicily and South Italy, it is, perhaps, only natural that scholars should have speculated on the relationship between this and the dramatic tradition that is best known to us – namely, that of Classical Athens.
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