Keith Hopkins Interviews Sir Moses Finley: October 1985 Transcript

[Ellipses indicate the occasional omission of repetitive or inconsequential remarks.]

Hopkins:

I have with me in the studio this afternoon the distinguished ancient historian Sir Moses Finley. Sir Moses was born in America, but in the mid-1950s came to England, went first to Oxford, then settled in Cambridge where he became professor of ancient history at the University of Cambridge. He then became Master of Darwin College, a post from which he has recently resigned.¹

Finley:

Retired, sorry.

Hopkins:

Retired—Moses, can you tell us about how your experiences in America influenced what you’ve done in ancient history?

Finley:

I think I might as well begin with a point that I was going to make sometime before we were through. It’s a question of how to phrase it in the least offensive way possible. But I think that for me the basic thing was that I had an American, and not a British, education. By which I’m not talking about particularly the quality of the teaching or anything. I’m talking about the fact that I was brought up in a society in which a one-subject degree, the decisions that you make at fourteen and fifteen, what you’re going to specialize in, just doesn’t exist and is considered anathema. And the result is that when I finally came to ancient history, I’d had a really very broad education, which most of my colleagues here don’t have, will not have had. It’s as crude as that. They will have come up to the university on three A-levels; and in too many cases, maybe a little less so now, the three A-levels were Latin, Greek, and Ancient History. And that meant that what they studied from about the ages of fifteen to eighteen was that. And when they came to the university they did Classics, and if they learned anything else, it was on their own. And I would have thought that’s the most important part of my experience.

Hopkins:

You began—curiously for a Greek historian—with Roman law, or with law, after when you did begin to specialize.

Finley:

Well, I began to specialize actually as a lawyer. This is my father. I’m sorry. My father was a patriarch who determined all his children’s careers for them. And I was to be a lawyer. But I was very young, and so I did a Master’s degree in American constitutional law and actually had a job in a law office, General Motors no less, where I was to work while I went to law school and so on. I got so bored after six months I quit. And got a small scholarship and decided I was going to study history. If you ask me why, it’s very hard for me to answer that except that I had read a book or two books, and they intrigued me. This was at the graduate school level, and my first interest was Renaissance/Medieval. And again the professors, who are now dead, so it’s no problem about this, they told me it was so boring that I couldn’t last two weeks. And the professor of ancient history² was a very exciting lecturer. So I went and said I wanted to do ancient history. And he said, “How much Latin do you know?” And I said, “None.” “How much Greek do you know?” And I said, “None.” And he said, “Go away and come back when you know a little.”

Hopkins:

How long did that take?

Finley:

A year, I suppose. I never took any courses. I’ve never had a course in Latin or Greek in my life. That’s only possible in the United States, that kind of thing. I’m not sure how possible it is now, but I think it still is.

Hopkins:

I think things have become slightly more formalized than they were.

Finley:

Yes, but at the graduate level there is still a very considerable amount...