67

The study of ancient Greek individuals and their family relationships is a difficult task. Specific people and connections are complicated to identify not only because of the poorly dated documentation, which offers few continuous series, but also due to the onomastic system based on single names, which does not attach the individual to a lineage beyond their father’s name. However, this onomastic system is an asset for the reconstruction of a particular type of relationship: when a person is identified as their father’s child, their name bears at least an explicit relation of filiation. In this article I use a suggestion made by Alain Bresson in 1984 to explore the Attic corpus: the cohesive groups revealed by network analysis based on links of filiation between two names may represent real kinship networks. This paper thus aims to construct a new methodology for studying the history of civic elites. How can we build onomastic networks that avoid methodological and documentary bias in the new context of accessible digital data? After demonstrating that it is possible to use the online data of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names for prosopographic purposes, the article explores the modes of investigation and narrative introduced not only by the corpus but also by the network as a tool.