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Picture Herakleia and Schinoussa, two small islands in the Aegean: they face each other, each little port confronting its twin. Schinoussa's port is protected towards the north-west, that of Herakl...

Irad Malkin is Maxwell Cummings Chair for Mediterranean History and Culture and professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University, where he coedits the Mediterranean Historical Review and directs the Center for Mediterranean Civilizations Project. Among his publications areReligion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (1987), Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (1994), and The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (1998), as well as an edited collection, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (2001).

The concept of networks, now common in a variety of current discourses from brain science to postmodernism and globalization, is also a salient heuristic concept for the Mediterranean. Shying away ...