M. I. Finley

Between Slavery and Freedom

I have taken my title from the Onomastikon or Word-Book of an Alexandrian Greek of the second century of our era named Julius Pollux. At the end of a longish section (3.73–83) listing, and sometimes exemplifying, the Greek words which meant “slave” or “enslave”, in certain contexts at least, Pollux noted that there were also men like the helots in Sparta or the penestae in Thessaly who stood “between the free men and the slaves”. It is no use pretending that this work is very penetrating or systematic, at least in the abridged form in which it has come down to us, but the foundation was laid in a much earlier work by a very learned scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C. The interest in the brief passage I have cited is that it suggests in so pointed a way that social status could be viewed as a continuum or spectrum; that there were statuses which could only be defined, even if very crudely, as “between slavery and freedom”. Customarily Greek and Roman writers were not concerned with such nuances. To be sure, the Romans had a special word for a freedman, libertus , as distinguished from liber , a free man. When it came to political status, furthermore, distinctions of all kinds were made, necessarily so. But for social status (which I trust I may be permitted, at this stage, to distinguish from political status), and often for purposes of private law, they were satisfied with the simple antinomy, slave or free, even though they could hardly have been unaware of certain gradations.

Myth, Memory, and History

The Fathers of History were Greeks. Historians of antiquity are very proud of that, so much so that they prefer not to remember that some of the best minds in antiquity were not all impressed by this achievement. History as a discipline has always been a great favorite with the coiners of bons mots it is false, it is dangerous, it is bunk. But it has never been dismissed more peremptorily, in a serious way, than in the f amous dictum in the ninth chapter of Aristotles Poetics:

The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond

The Graeco-Roman world, with which I am concerned to the exclusion of the pre- Greek Near East, was a world of cities. Even the agrarian population, always a majority, most often lived in communities of some kind, hamlets, villages, towns, not in isolated farm homesteads.1 It is a reasonable and defensible guess that, for the better part of a thousand years, more and more of the inhabitants of Europe, northern Africa and western Asia lived in towns, in a proportion that was not matched in the United States, for example, until the Civil War. (Admittedly only a guess is possible, since statistics are lacking for antiquity.) The ancients themselves were firm in their view that civilized life was thinkable only in and because of cities. Hence the growth of towns as the regular and relentless accompaniment of the spread of Graeco-Roman civilization; eastward after the conquests of Alexander as far as the Hindukush, to the west from Africa to Britain with the Roman conquests, until the number of towns rose into the thousands. So self-evident did the urban underpinning of civilization seem to the ancients that they scarcely engaged in a serious analysis of the city.

Studies in Roman Property.

Preface 1. Introduction M. I. Finley 2. Some configurations of landholding in the Roman empire R. P. Duncan-Jones 3. Imperial estates Dorothy J. Crawford 4. Classical Roman law and the sale of land John Crook 5. The Ciceronian aristocracy and its properties Elizabeth Rawson 6. Private farm tenancy in Italy before Diocletian M. I. Finley 7. Urban property investment Peter Garnsey 8. Agri deserti C. R. Whittaker Notes Bibliography Index.

The Trojan war

Mr Finleys article is an elaborated version of a talk first broadcast in October 1963. It was offered for publication with the intention of stimulating discussion of a problem which has been exercising archaeologists and historians. For this reason its author does not here answer the provisional criticisms and comments offered by Professor Caskey, Mr Kirk and Professor Page which are also printed below. It is hoped that this presentation will help to define for readers the very varied issues which attend the problem of the date and nature of the Trojan War.

Studies in land and credit in ancient Athens, 500-200 B.C. : the horos inscriptions

In this classic study of the social and economic aspects of landcredit relationships in ancient Athens, first published in 1952, Moses Finley presents a systematic account of the guarantee aspects of credit. He examines the outward forms of credit transactions, the legal instruments employed, the kind of real property customarily used to guarantee debts, and the parties engaged in these transactions.

The Elderly in Classical Antiquity

For evidence about the extent and experience of old age in classical antiquity, one must rely excessively on literature and mythology, with their heavy bias towards the leisured classes and their lack of quantitative data. Nevertheless, there are bases for some plausible inferences: both life expectancy and for most people the standard of living were low, with a consequence of an early commencement of ‘adult’ employment and the absence of any notion (or possibility) of retirement; those hardy and lucky enough to survive of ten appear to have retained a vigorous creativity into very old age; emotional relations (e.g. between parents and children) were coloured by such factors as high infant mortality and the relative early death of parents and grandparents. The absence of really large cities, other than Rome and one or two others, and of rural isolation (the homestead farm, for example) reduced the dangers of the kind of loneliness associated with the modern bed-sitter, though problems of old age fell solely on the family (rather than the community). Medical literature showed a surprising lack of interest in mental illness associated with old age or even in medical problems other than the obvious ones of debility, and there is no way for us to penetrate the silence.

Ancient History: Evidence and Models

In this study, the author challenges the prevailing traditions of researching and writing about ancient civilizations. He questions, for example, the special status accorded to classic texts, exposes the false assumptions historians have made, based on limited information, and presents the flaws inherent in conventional explanations of the Greek city-state. Emphasizing the need to ask the right questions in order to expand our understanding of life in the ancient world, this work shows how historians might better deal with the evidence that is available and offers alternative methods that can be used to reconstruct history.