This chapter begins by synthesising the results of the previous modelling chapters, also considering how far one might go with conclusions in each case, given the limits and quality of the various datasets. Having synthesised these data, the models are tested against two ‘known’ networks, described in ancient literature: the Ionian League and the Kalaureian Amphiktyony. In highlighting the differences between the expected and the actual results, the case is made that literature and historical documents can project a greater degree of unity between communities than might have in reality been expressed or presented for reasons of their own political gain and unity.

This book closes by returning to the problem of the polis, and to considering the extent to which a fresh approach can contribute new thoughts to an old debate. In considering what exactly an ancient city was, its activities are emphasised: the fact that a city formed political and economic connection with its neighbours helped to define it. The potentials and pitfalls of modelling for historical enquiry are considered, and the case is made for a more data-driven and ‘scientific’ classical archaeology of the next generation.

This chapter considers the problem of ‘heavy freight’, a problem posited by Anthony Snodgrass in the 1980s concerning how Greeks might have moved heavy goods like marble around the Greek world. A dataset of freestanding marble statues is presented, where the size and the shape of these statues is used to consider how much marble might have been used in the Greek world during various economic production processes. After estimating the scale of the industry, this chapter uses spatial network modelling to consider some of the routes along which marble might have been transported on the sea, using a rules-based system that ships will always have gone the most direct route from-anchorage-to-anchorage. The shape of these networks is then discussed in light of their implications for our understanding of the whole of the Greek world.

This chapter builds on the discussion of product shipping from the previous chapter, but by introducing a different sort of product: commodity or semi-luxury goods (in the words of Lin Foxhall), things transported in ceramic amphoras that were also loaded onto ships. The distribution of pottery from across various sanctuaries and urban sites is considered to make the point that certain sites ‘specialised’ in various products, and that there might be evidence for Greeks selecting certain products for import or export. This element of choice is indicative of a wide amount of economic knowledge circulating in the Greek world that is not immediately materially visible. Spatial network modelling is conducted for this dataset too, revealing similar shapes to those from the previous chapter, and making the case for possible ‘piggy-backing’ of goods shipped from similar production sites to points of consumption.

The dataset discussed in this chapter is coinage, specifically the first coinage minted in the Aegean Basin. The start of this chapter considers to what extent coinage was first used as either an economic or a political tool, and, therefore, whether any patterns in the dataset will reveal more about political or economic networks. In presenting continuities of the dataset using a network analytical model, this chapter illustrates how the spread of coinage across the Aegean from Ionian innovators is indicative of a pattern in the spread of technology. This pattern is juxtaposed with the distribution of amphoras pattern, indicating that there is a qualitatively similar economic pattern, albeit separated with a large time-lag. This pattern is a useful reminder that different types of economic network laid the foundations for one another, and that material evidence may not always be contemporary with the formation of networks.

This chapter begins by considering the pattern of archaeology in Greece form the past 100 years that has generated huge datasets – and that these datasets have been largely under deployed in making historical conclusions about Greece of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. After reviewing the history of scholarship on ‘Archaic Greece’ (and the relative quietness of scholarship on this topic in the most recent decades) this chapter considers ways in which the huge amount of data from Archaic Greece could be organised and analysed. Various methods from the Digital Humanities are considered, with discussion focusing also on data cleaning and organisation, before proposing that network analysis will be a useful framework for this study in making clear the ways in which the first communities of Archaic Greece formed economic and political alliances – and rivalries – with one another.

The Hippocratic treatise Diseases 4 is well known for explaining corporeal processes through vivid analogies with plants, cupping glasses, bronze vessels, swirling wine sediment, coagulating cheese, and blocked oil flasks. Scholars have often applied a heuristic dichotomy to these arguments, evaluating whether they are “mechanistic” (i.e., rely solely on recognizable physical forces) or “vitalistic” (i.e., attribute special capacities to living tissues and parts). Comparisons to implements tend to line up on the former side, while plant analogies support the latter. Rather than focus on delineating these two types of explanations, this chapter emphasizes that the author draws both sets of comparative objects from the therapies, implements, and techniques that a physician would have either administered to the body or encountered in the more general practice of medicine. Whether comparing the attractive capacity of the four inner “springs” (head, heart, gallbladder, spleen) to medicinal plants drawing up particular nutriment from the soil, or likening these same springs to bronze vessels, Diseases 4 amalgamates medical tools and the bodies that they treat. Its view of corporeality therefore emerges at the physical and conceptual interface between flesh and the therapeutic technologies that affect it, as the body absorbs and enfolds medical tools and substances.

This chapter presents the several modes of reduction of the shoulder described by Hippocrates in On Joints 2–7 and evaluates them in relation to the phenomenon of leverage and the ancient tool, the lever (mochlos). It argues that Hippocrates’ understanding of leverage is a feature of his expertise as iētros and did not derive from any separate mechanical or scientific knowledge. This is especially interesting, since Hippocrates knew of the lever and some of its uses, but he describes techniques involving the reciprocal forces exerted between the patient’s dislocated bones and the physician’s own body. The chapter makes use of the analytic distinction between ostension and ostensive definition to characterize this expertise. It distinguishes among experience of physical forces, art that arises from such experience, and the physical principles of leverage that emerged a century or more later. There are references to On Fractures and On the Art.