Hugh Lloyd-Jones on the virtues of a literary culture
In the 'thirties the great benefactor of classical studies in this country was Adolf Hitler, who gained for us the services of a group of distinguished scholars from the Continent. Beside his colossal statue we should erect a smaller one to Senator Joseph MacCarthy, without whom Professor M. I. Finley might not have left America in the 'fifties and moved to Cambridge. Since then he has been a vital force in the study of ancient history in this country, never more than during the last year, when he has published a learned and original study of The Ancient Economy, a stimulating small book Democracy: Ancient and Modern, and now a collection of twelve essays* which are as good as, if not better than, anything he has done before. They make an important contribution to scholarship which is also of great interest and value to the general reader; and like all Professor Finley's works they deserve to be and will be widely read.
Professor Finley tells us that the echo in his title of Nietzsche's essay 'On the Use and Disadvantage of History' is not an accident; and although he is no Nietzschian—the only false statement I have found in the book is the claim (pp. 193-4) that Nietzsche was a German nationalist — he writes history in a way that satisfies most of Nietzsche's requirements. In the past ancient history in England has too often taken the form of what ,Nietzsche calls "monumental history," which as he says quickly slides into mythical fiction. Large parts of the Cambridge Ancient History (I am not referring to the new edition) seem to me to fall within this category; one of its main editors, Professor Finley's Cambridge predecessor Sir Frank Adcock, has always supplied me with my mental picture of Isocrates, who is not Professor Finley's favourite ancient author.
Ancient history too often took the form of a bland continuous narrative, its tone and interests dictated by those of the Greek and Roman historians themselves; the questions that a modern student of history, politics or social life would ask were not raised by scholars ignorant of the modern world to which they were supposed to be interpreting the ancient. Another defect of English ancient historians in the past is closely allied with one of the principal advantages they have enjoyed, that of receiving a sound literary and linguistic training. Many of them have been too busy with textual exposition, epigraphy and other ancillary disciplines to give proper attention to the actual subject-matter of ancient history and to the problems which it poses to the modern student. An historian singularly free from both these defects is one of the scholars whose *The Uses and Abuses of History M. 1. Finley (Chatto and Windus £4.50). presence we owe to Hitler, not forgetting Mussolini — Arnaldo Momigliano, to whom this book is dedicated and to whose work one of the essays is devoted.
Professor Finley is above all else a critical historian, alert to diagnose and to attack a problem;.he rightly argues that history without generalisations is no history at all. His keen intelligence is specially effective where scepticism is needed. He has already done valuable work in resisting the temptation to exaggerate the historical element contained in the Homeric epics; and now he rightly questions the assumption, made even by great scholars, of a general unity underlying the diversity of the Greek legal systems. He points out that we have no reason to suppose that the main features of the Spartan system were earlier than the sixth century, and that the origins of some of the customs that played a part in it are hardly relevant to their functions. He reminds us how little the later Greeks cared to follow Herodotus and Thucydides in writing critical history, and how little they thought of themselves as a nation. Ready as he is to make use of other disciplines to illuminate this own, his attitude to them is never unwary. In discussing the relevance of anthropology (and sociology) to the classics he argues that functional anthropology is insufficiently sensitive to the element of change; this is true, but in the past classical scholars have so exaggerated the 'development' of ancient society and culture that Levi-Strauss's insistence that the synchronic picture must not be obscured by the diachronic has its value. In a paper about archaeology in relation to history Professor Finley deals condignly with arbitrary guesses about early religion based on archaeological data, but at the same time makes an equally justified protest against the tendency to seal off archaeology as an independent discipline forming a private preserve for archaeologists, and he supports his protest by giving examples of the kind of data useful to historians which archaeologists often will not trouble to provide. His familiarity with modern as well as ancient history is nowhere more in evidence than in the brilliant inaugural lecture given at Cambridge in 1970 where he compares the assertion, common in fifth-century Athens, that the Athenians must either conserve or return to their 'ancestral constitution' with the use of corresponding legends of 'the Saxon customs' and `Jeffersonian democracy' in the England of the early Stuarts and the America of the New Deal.
I come lastly to two essays with which my sympathy is less complete, an excellent survey of ancient Utopias, drawing some necessary distinctions and, in particular, marking them off from Golden Ages, is rounded off with a page or two on modern Utopianism. This Professor Finley complains, has become paralysed; now that technology removes the material difficulties that stand in the way of the establishment of Utopias, the difficulties raised by "the burdens of fear and guilt, of domination," seem more formidable than before. He feels sad that modern Utopias tend to be Dystopias (Huxley, Orwell); he does not actually mention that one or two actual attempts to bring the thing off do not seem to all of us to have been complete successes. A reference to Popper might have been in place here; the collection Conjectures and Refutations actually contains a paper called 'Utopias and Violence.' ,
The last essay in the book is called 'The Heritage of Isocrates.' Professor Finley complains that for two thousand years higher education has been centred upon literary culture; as modern advocates of this dispensation he cites E. R. Curtius and F. R. Leavis, but as I read the chapter I could not help thinking of Sir Frank Adcock. Professor Finley argues that this state of affairs "is no longer firmly grounded in the social structure and its institutional arrangements"; it seems a pity that his indication of the measures he would take is crowded into half a page at the very end. "First," he writes, "the range and variety of experience, literary, philosophical, historical, scientific, which schooling contributes to the equipment of the student must be enlarged and correlated so as to be adequate to life in a democratic society of great technical complexity, improving material satisfaction and increasing free time." For this purpose education is to be continued "into the early years of intellectual, emotional and social maturity,'' also, the past is to be deconsecrated and converted into a living, a relevant past.
I find here a certain vagueness; but it seems certain that Professor Finley's statement would not to be found fault with by, and might even encourage those who would make a training like that given by the University of Essex compulsory for all. It seems certain, too, that he would like to see literary and linguistic education much curtailed. In America, Where Rousseauite reluctance to make children work has been propagated by the powerful influence of John Dewey, few children are taught languages at the age at which the memory is best; the resulting ignorance seems to me in many ways unfortunate. Even in historical study, to say nothing of other studies or of life in general, languages, literature, and the history of religion and metaphysics have something to contribute.
Historians who are As sensitive to these departments of life as Syme or Trevor-Roper,, and like them are themselves distinguished writers in a literary sense, command not only an instrument of communication but an instrument of historical understanding which is not at the disposal of historians who, however, keen and searching their intelligence and however clear and concise their style, have been denied or have failed to develop this particular gift. Apart from whatever value it may have for its own sake, Greek and Roman literature played such an important part in the life and politics of its time that it is specially important to historians. Even the general student of antiquity must take adequate account of this, and no general survey which fails to do so can be recommended without reserve. The fox who had lost his tail in a trap, tried to persuade all the other foxes to cut oft their tails also. We know that there are verY fin! foxes without tails, and that is lucky, sin,c, P' before long the tails of all fox-cubs will e. amputated in the name of social justice. BLit' until then we shall not allow even the most eloquent of tailless foxes to persuade us to al` off our own.
Hugh Lloyd-Jones is Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford.
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