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“... was de facto, not de jure: there were no hereditary titles, no peerage in the formal sense. The main offices of state, in which there was no distinction between civilian and military posts, were monopolised by the aristocracy, except when they themselves sponsored ‘new men’ for admission, the most famous, or at least the most self-advertised, of whom ...”

“... Of the 53 short essays, book reviews, lectures and obituaries assembled in Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s two volumes, two were published in the year before he assumed the Regius Professorship of Greek in the University of Oxford, one was his Inaugural Lecture of 1960, and the remainder were written subsequently. I say this not as a prelude to yet another bad joke about ‘the other place’ but because it is impossible to appreciate the two volumes without some understanding of the course of Classical studies in 20th-century Britain and of the author’s role in them ...”

“... years ago, in the course of reading up the history of technology, I came across an article by M.I. Finley, of whom I then knew nothing, on ‘Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World’, reprinted in his essays on Economy and Society in Ancient Greece. Looking up my notes, and rereading the article today, I now see that I missed most of ...”

“... write the biography of a friend you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.’ Sir Moses Finley has been my teacher, colleague and friend for close on twenty years, and while I am not intent on taking revenge on his behalf, I can’t claim to be able to write dispassionately about his work, on the occasion of the publication of his new book, Ancient ...”

“... Twenty-five years ago M.I. Finley made a plea in the TLS for ‘unfreezing the Classics’. The discipline of ancient history, he argued, was in crisis: submerged in the stultifying traditions of old-fashioned Classical philology, cut off from dialogue with ‘proper’ history, political science and sociology, it was no longer part of any wider cultural debate ...”

“... theatre, in a handsomely illustrated pamphlet which gives amazing value for its price, Sir Moses Finley also protests against historicist depreciation of poetry. ‘It is currently fashionable among some classical scholars in this country,’ he writes, ‘including some of the most highly reputed, to underrate, and even denigrate, the content of the ...”

“... tacitly adhering instead to the Weberian understanding of ancient economic life advocated by M.I. Finley, rather than the insights of G.E.M. de Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981). That masterpiece is a touchstone for Peter Rose, who like de Ste Croix insists that the formation of the state apparatus in the early Greek polis and ...”