Review

The reprinting of Finley's fine collection of 12 essays, first brought together in 1975, is very welcome. The great scholar of the ancient world here considers, from a variety of perspectives, the ways in which great civilizations have viewed their past over the last three millennia. He begins with the historians of ancient Greece who first sought to replace myth with documented and verifiable history. One kind of myth is that of the 'ancestral constitution' and in a stimulating piece he shows the endurance, in societies as distinct as Greece in the 4th century BC, Cromwellian England, and America during the New Deal, of chimerical notions of ancient rights and popular liberties, invoked by politicians to justify their causes. Finley also looks at the methods by which the past has been studied and considers the relationship between history, anthropology and archaeology. Finally, a group of essays provide a superb defence of the study of ancient societies, their law and democracy, their ideas of nationhood, and their utopian dreams. This book helps us to think in new ways both about the past and the present. (Kirkus UK)

Product Description

This is a collection of the author's essays illuminating discussions of some major issues: the nature of the Spartan state; the development of Greek law; mythological thinking in the Greek historians; and utopian ideas old and new.