What Facebook Doesn't Tell Us About Homer's Odyssey

There's a reason that, some 3,000 or so years later, we still study works by Homer. Many of the scenes from works such as The Odyssey still resonate, such as Odysseus lashing himself to the mast in order to hear the Sirens' beautiful song or Penelope weaving and unweaving, delicately dancing with the intentions of her prospective suitors as she waits for her husband to return. And every few years a new translation appears for us (though none quite so compelling recently as Prof. Emily Wilson's) to re-enchant us and remind us of how much more we can learn.

What we can learn, however, often depends on the questions we ask.

A recent article published by 3 physicists (also summarized here) claims to show that The Odyssey has a "real-life" structure, specifically in that its characters are connected in complex networks to one another much like, they say, people connect to one another via Facebook. These physicists continue:

To examine this [network] more closely, we reran the analysis, this time excluding mythological characters like gods and monsters. The remaining network was even more similar to what you would expect in real life. On the other hand, we ran an analysis that excluded the human characters and kept the mythological ones, and were left with an entirely fictional network. The obvious conclusion is that The Odyssey is an amalgam of real and fictional characters.

Therefore, these authors conclude that some of The Odyssey is based on some real people from ancient Greece.

But we already knew all that.

As Daniel Walden, a PhD student in Classics at the University of Michigan, explained to me over email, ancient Greek literature had a "keen awareness of the difference between literal and literary truth" and loved to play with the paradoxes of the relationship between the two. The poet Hesiod, for example, wrote that the Muses - the embodiments of poetry - can sing about true things but also of "many false things that are like true ones." The latter is verisimilitude, fiction that is just like real life.

As generations of scholars have shown, Walden continued, the differences between gods and men in Homer's works is precisely the point - the suffering of men meant to be in stark contrast to the petty squabbles of the gods. A student of the Humanities would already know this, would take as a given "the necessity of reading ancient sources carefully: of evaluating agendas and assumptions, situating texts in the context of history and genre, and assessing what sort of questions they might help to answer." But by failing to take into consideration the foundational questions Humanities scholars ask of their sources, these researchers were taken in by the many false things that are like true ones. This particular network analysis did what it was supposed to do. It failed because it didn't answer the question that was asked in the first place. In other words, the ship did what it was supposed to do but the pilot was seduced by the Sirens into the rocks. As others have noted, STEM needs the Humanities - but not as a sort of "Finishing School." STEM needs the Humanities as an equal partner, one that is taken seriously in what questions are being asked about problems, how those questions are investigated, and how the resulting data are analyzed. And there are a generation of scholars in the Humanities out there, eager to share their work with the public, eager to collaborate with scholars in other disciplines.

In the end, it would be an interesting experiment to do a complex network analysis of scholars in different disciplines and how they share their research with the public. Who talks to who? But then the problem would lie with the analysis of the results. Or to put it another way, which groups would be closer to real life? Which groups would be gods, and which would be men?