Volume 22, Number 16 · October 16, 1975
The Greeks and Us
By Arnaldo Momigliano
Democracy Ancient and Modern
by M.I. Finley
Rutgers University Press, 118 pp., $6.00
The Ancient Economy
by M.I. Finley
University of California Press, 222 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The Use and Abuse of History
by M.I. Finley
Viking, 254 pp., $10.00
When Moses Finley came to England from Rutgers University in 1954 as a refugee from the McCarthy persecution he had just published his Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens (1952) and was about to publish his World of Odysseus (1954). Taken together, these two books showed him to be the best living social historian of Greece and the one most prepared to face the methodological problems which social history implies. This was recognized by a restricted group of specialists which included the men who gave him a choice between Oxford and Cambridge (he settled in the latter and in 1970 succeeded A. H. M. Jones in the Chair of Ancient History). But even his warmest supporters did not expect that in less than twenty years Finley would become the most influential ancient historian of our time, equally respected and studied on both sides of what used to be called the Iron Curtain.
Review, 3507 words
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