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The fifteen papers in this collection originated in one of the (many) international celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Sir Moses Finley (1912-1986), but the purpose of this conference was, explicitly, “to assess his impact,” rather than “simply to remember and to celebrate” the man (xv). While a few of the papers do manage to “remember” Finley, and generally quite fondly, many are better characterized as exercises in rereading Finley’s published works and discovering what one has misremembered about Finley’s main asseverations. Robin Osborne’s “somewhat dim and selective memories” (58) of The World of Odysseus (New York 1954) dissipated upon revisiting the actual book (which he had first encountered at sixteen), and his sentiment is echoed in Jonathan Prag’s gloomy assessment of the “disappointing” nature of A History of Sicily: Ancient Sicily to the Arab Conquest (London 1968) upon his own rereading, which matched the opinion of “one eminent scholar of ancient Sicily” (125 and 120). When he conducted his own rereading of Democracy Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick 1973, rev. 1985), Paul Cartledge “kept getting an uncomfortable feeling that what I had thought were my own original views were actually Finley’s-and not always those that he published in DAM . . . but those that he’d spun more conjecturally in his ‘History of Political Thought’ lectures” (211).
Cartledge’s choice of words is particularly apt here, since the force majeure of Finley’s “impact” seems to...