If Achilles Used Facebook…

WHEN we pick up a mythological text like “The Iliad” or “Beowulf,” we like to imagine that the societies they describe existed.

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Even if the stories are fiction, we believe that they tell us something about ancient Greece or the Anglo-Saxons, and that some of the characters and events were based on reality.

Archaeological evidence suggests that at least some of the societies and events in such stories did exist.

But is there other evidence, lurking perhaps within the ancient texts themselves?

To investigate that question, we turned to a decidedly modern tool: social-network analysis.

In a study published in Europhysics Letters, we……

• If Achilles Used…