This retrospective work on M.I. Finley and his impact is the product of a conference marking the centenary of Finley's birth held at the University of Cambridge (29–31 May 2012). The volume consists of twelve chapters, many written by scholars who likewise will have conferences held in their honour on the centenary of their births. This is not a biography of Finley, rather it is a tightly focused collection of semi-chronological pieces covering various aspects of his career and legacy. The editors are to be credited for the organisation and discipline each of the contributors showed in keeping within their lanes. The volume as a whole raises several overarching questions concerning how to truly measure an academic's contribution and just how one should approach writing history with regards to personal ideology. For reflection on these questions alone, this collection rewards the serious reader well.
Chapters are presented in the order of publication of Finley's books, giving the volume its chronological structure; each chapter is footnoted, with a collective bibliography at the end, which includes a full list of Finley's works in various languages and editions. The contributors include several who knew Finley personally. Of the sixteen contributors, eleven have deep associations with Cambridge, giving this an overall Cambridge-centric aspect.
In a brief introduction editors Jew, Osborne and Scott frame the objective of the conference and this publication, focusing on the questions to be considered and the structure of the volume. They remark on what set Finley apart from other scholars at Cambridge in the 1950s and 60s. British Classics and Ancient History had been narrowly and insularly focused on scrutinising the precise wording of Greek and Latin texts. To this environment Finley brought a broader view based on his grounding in the social sciences, asked different questions and employed different methodologies. He also engaged a broader audience. He entered British academia as an outsider, having come from America and collaborated with scholars particularly in Europe that went beyond the UK traditions of the time.
D.P. Tompkins covers Finley's American career and his arrival to the UK as a refugee from US McCarthyism in the 1950s. Finley's early interest in agrarian issues, in social relationships and their economic impact is noted. Chapters by D.J. Thompson on teaching Ancient History, M. Beard on Journalism, G. Lloyd on Finley's impact on Cambridge, and P. Garnsey (Chapter 10) and W. Nippel (Chapter 14) on Finley's relationship with other scholars, build a compelling case for Finley's influence beyond academic publishing. Thompson, a student of Finley's, notes that he, together with A.H.M. Jones, brought a thematic approach to a subject that in the late 1950s was largely studied as a background for literature. Thompson's chapter is backed by a series of appendices with testimonials from other students. Beard documents that Finley produced 20–30,000 words per year of articles for popular journals, reviews and radio broadcasts often reprinted as scripts. A radio interview is printed as an appendix. It would have been interesting to read of Beard's experience in her current popular television work and how it contrasted with Finley's work in radio. As Thompson comments, Lloyd notes that Finley brought to Cambridge a new approach to Ancient History, asking different questions and exploring different topics such as the ancient economy, slavery, the law, politics and others, thereby moving Cambridge away from what had been dry and dusty philology in the tradition of A.E. Housman. Garnsey, who personally knew Finley, describes Finley's interaction with Arnaldo Momigliano at Cambridge, and Nippel with continental European scholars.
P. Millett examines Land and Credit in Ancient Athens, 500–200 b.c. (1952), Finley's most academically structured publication based on a study of Athenian horoi and Attic orators about land ownership, debt and obligations. What comes through in this piece is Finley's insistence that one must engage the ancients on their terms, not on modern terms, especially economic institutions. The text of Finley's book is uncluttered, with detailed discussion placed in the end notes. The reader does not need to be a specialist to assimilate the main text, a literary style he was to continue to use. Interestingly, Millett's chapter discusses Karl Polanyi and his relationship with Finley while other chapters comment more on Max Weber's influence. Given A. Launaro's comments in his review of The Ancient Economy, it is surprising that there is not more on Polanyi in this collection (see M. Nafissi, Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology: Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical Sources. Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley [2005] on aspects of Polanyi and Weber in Finley's work). Tompkins's review of Nafissi's book (in History and Theory 47 [2008], 123–36) shows how challenging unwrapping the influence on Finley of Weber and Polanyi is.
The World of Odysseus (1954 and eight subsequent editions) is Finley's most re-issued book, and R. Osborne evaluates its impact principally by reviewing the reviews on it. Finley combined archaeology and textual information in a book written for a general audience free of jargon and technicalities. Osborne and others have been critical of Finley's interpretation developed by taking episodes from Homer and placing them in a world that Finley imagined as a given, but never argued for.
K. Vlassopoulos's chapter on ancient slavery, the topic of several of Finley's publications, is one of the strongest in the volume. Vlassopoulos covers the scholarship pre-Finley, Finley's own and post-Finley in a clear and compelling style. This reviewer would include Vlassopoulos's chapter in an undergraduate course reading list. The discussion on what differentiates a ‘slave society’ from a society ‘that owns slaves’ is thought-provoking as well as the categorisation of slavery into three discursive contexts: modernists, humanitarian and Marxist. One of the main criticisms of Finley's scholarship comes out in this chapter. Finley's view is often static and simplistic as opposed to a more dynamic interpretation that saw slavery operating differently across various societies and roles. Finley's view of the rentier mentality that elites owned the land and exploited it with slave labour for their benefit is prominent and brings him the closest to the Marxist notion of class struggle.
J.R.W. Prag tackles Finley's 1968 volume A History of Sicily: Ancient Sicily to the Arab Conquest, one of a three-volume set written with D. Mack Smith. All three volumes were printed without footnotes (per Finley, at Mack Smith's insistence, Finley included footnotes in a 1979 revised edition). Prag notes that the reason this piece is not often cited (documented in W. Scheidel's concluding chapter) is that it was simply too ‘popular’ despite having a number of stimulating sections in it.
P. Cartledge discusses Finley's Democracy Ancient and Modern, first published in 1973 (missing from the general bibliography) and a second edition of 1985 that included footnotes, as well as appearing in several translations. Cartledge focuses on the book's reception, including a lengthy list of publications that were in some way descendants of Finley's work, whether in agreement or opposition.
Launaro takes on the task of writing the chapter on Finley's magnum opus (as Scheidel quantifies), The Ancient Economy, first edition 1973, second in 1985 with an added chapter, as well as numerous translations. Finley's presentation hangs on several key principles that Launaro does an exemplary job of elucidating, covering scholarship pre- and post-Finley, including a distillation of New Institutional Economics. The lasting criticism of The Ancient Economy is that Finley's interpretation of the ancient economy is too static, remaining unchanged over 1,500 years of history. Finley's invariant perspective is clearly at odds with the evidence, and Launaro suggests that Finley could not give a proper account of change within an embedded perspective, something K. Hopkins noted as well (‘Introduction’, in P. Garnsey, K. Hopkins and C.R. Whittaker [edd.], Trade in the Ancient Economy [1983], p. xiv). J.G. Manning (The Open Sea [2018], p. xxii) wrote that Finley's work capped an era of economic theory based on primitivist and modernist interpretations with layers of formal and substantive concepts (see Launaro's Fig. 5).
The final aspect reviewed in this volume is ‘Finley and Archaeology’ by J. Gates-Foster. Gates-Foster suggests that Finley struggled with how the historian should incorporate archaeological findings. She does a superb job of drawing out the periods of archaeological theory and Finley's relationship to them, concluding that often narrowly focused archaeology does not fit with Finley's penchant for broad-sweeping generalisations.
The omission of Finley's article ‘The Mycenaean Tablets and Economic History’ (Economic Historical Review 10 [1957], 128–41) from the volume is surprising. Published immediately after M. Ventris and J. Chadwick's Documents in Mycenaean Greek (1956), Finley proposed a palace-based redistributive economic system that, though challenged, continues to be part of the academic landscape (see J. Bennet, ‘The Aegean Bronze Age’, in W. Scheidel, I. Morris and R. Saller [edd.], The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World [2007], pp. 175–210). Finley's redistributive model is a major component of his legacy.
Two overriding themes from the volume bear reflection. Several contributors point out in detail that Finley's legacy comprises much more than his scholarly writing. His contributions are found more in his lectures, popular engagement through the press and radio, and mentoring of students and colleagues. How then is this to be squared with an assessment system based solely on scholarly publication embodied in the REF? A system that would judge a Michelin-starred chef on her cookbooks rather than her food and satisfied diners.
The second is Finley's insistence that to do history properly, one must do it from a personal philosophical perspective and not one of neutrality. This is a provocative question. Two alternative approaches contemporary with Finley to consider: B. Tuchman (Practicing History [1982], pp. 22–3) wrote against ‘prefabricated systems’ and preferred to leave the question ‘why’ alone until after all the facts have been gathered and arranged in sequence, at which time the answer will present itself. To do otherwise risks preferring the facts that fit the system best. At the other end of the spectrum, D.C. North and R.P. Thomas (The Rise of the Western World, A New Economic History [1973], p. vii) proclaimed from the first page their intention to use ‘a new comprehensive analytical framework to examine and explain the rise of the western world’ (for more see J. North, ‘Ancient History Today’ [2009] and G. Herman, ‘The Problem of Moral Judgement in Modern Historical Writing on Ancient Greece’ [2011], both in Cartledge's bibliography on p. 225). Finley's approach is more elusive, and this volume does an excellent job of bringing out the nuances of it. If the question of historiographical approach is of interest, this book should be on your reading list.
