1 Network Analysis and Greco-Roman Prosopography

Social network analysis as a distinct field of study had its genesis in the anthropological revolt against structural-functionalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was born through an awareness among a new generation of scholars that structural-functional models failed to make adequate space for human agency. Attention to personal networks – who knew whom, and how closely they were connected – seemed better suited to understanding individual decision-making than the previous generation‟s focus on groups and roles. It quickly became evident that any serious attempt to map social networks of meaningful size – the population of an entire village, for instance – would all but require a rigorous quantitative approach. Here, the mathematics of graph theory, growing in prominence since the 1950s, provided a natural fit. With the advent of computer technology, graph theory provides network analysts with relatively simple tools for answering complex questions: e.g. how many degrees of separation on average separate all members of a network? which member of the network is connected to the most other members of the network? how densely or loosely connected is the network as a whole? Such questions hold a natural interest for prosopographers, who can then begi