ANALYSIS OF AN ANCIENT NETWORK - PERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND THE STUDY OF SOCIAL-STRUCTURE IN A PAST SOCIETY

Ancient historians generally understand that confidence in our reconstruction of Roman social structure must be limited by the recognition that we rely, at least in part, on biased statements about it by the Romans themselves. Communication research offers a method of analyzing interactions between individuals on a quantitative and comprehensive basis which allows us to achieve a more reliable picture of the Roman social structure. This paper tests an hypothesis about the positioning of Roman senators and knights in the social structure of Roman society. A corpus of ancient texts is analyzed, coding who-to-whom relations in 280 letters written by Cicero from 68 B.C. to 43 B.C. Network analysis is performed. This study produces two kinds of benefit. In terms of the historical question at hand, the results show that senators and knights occupied structurally similar positions in Cicero's network of relations. These results cast doubt on a traditional view of a sharp division between senators and knights, and lend support to a more recent approach. In terms of communication methodology, this research shows that the value of applying relational content-network analysis of messages to test hypotheses about social systems when questioning the actual participants about their social relations is not feasible. © 1990.