RECEPTION AND HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP
Prussian army – W. Rüstow and H. Köchly, H.
Delbrück, J. Kromayer and G. Veith. Were their
interests a product of their Prussian education or
did they help enshrine its Spartan focus?
Ultimately, though, none of this detracts from the
work’s overall quality. It betrays its nature as a
published doctoral thesis by repeatedly enumer-
ating its contributions to scholarship – but it is an
excellent if harrowing read and it certainly has
much to add to many historical fields.
ROEL KONIJNENDIJK
University College London
r.konijnendijk@ucl.ac.uk
HARRIS (W.V.) Ed. Moses Finley and Politics.
Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. x + 155. €92. 97890-
04261679.
doi:10.1017/S0075426915001202
The present volume presents a series of papers that
explores the life and career of Moses Finley in
terms of their relationship to ancient and modern
politics. Although they range rather widely, the
chapters focus on three main areas: the first is
Finley’s early life in the 1920s, 1930s and early
1940s, before the beginning of his academic
career; the second concerns the crucial period of
McCarthyism, in which Finley found himself at
the mercy of anti-communist hysteria, was fired
from his job and ultimately found his way to
England where he pursued a brilliant career and
spent the rest of his life; finally, a third theme
concerns Finley’s works on politics and his
involvement in public affairs during his English
period.
The study of the first two subjects is severely
hampered by Finley’s conscious decision, once he
left the States, to draw an almost complete blank
over his early life and his political involvements:
establishing even basic facts is often difficult, and
assessing the impact of his origins and political
involvement on his historical thinking is not an
easy task. It is also made difficult by the
discrepancy between the handful of Finley’s publi-
cations in the 1930s and 1940s, and the enormous
and continuous spate of publications that started in
the early 1950s; it is very difficult to perceive to
what extent his early intellectual development had
an impact on his later work. The papers try to deal
with these problems with varying levels of success.
D. Tompkins discusses the political formation
of Finley by examining the political and intel-
lectual implications of Finley’s involvement in the
303
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (ESS) and
the Institute for Social Research, as well as various
popular fronts for progressive causes against
racism, for the defence of intellectual freedom and
for support of the Soviet Union. S. Schwartz
explores Finley’s Jewish background and
education, arguing that it went deeper than
normally assumed; he also discusses Finley’s
published views on Judaism and concludes with a
stimulating assessment of the limits that Finley’s
orientalism put on his interpretation of the ancient
economy. R. Saller picks up the baton to explore
how Finley’s early studies and work for the ESS
familiarized him with contemporary economics,
and argues that they provided the ghost image of
what Finley would later claim did not exist in
antiquity.
Moving to the next topic, E. Schrecker
discusses the various Red Scares against US
academics from the early 1940s to the early 1950s,
and gives a detailed account of the process that led
to Finley’s testimony in front of the McCarran
Committee and his ultimate dismissal from
Rutgers University in 1952; Schrecker stresses
that Finley’s dismissal and the debates it engen-
dered were path-breaking for how academic estab-
lishments dealt with political pressure against left-
wing intellectuals. A. Kessler-Harris examines
how the witch-hunt that depicted communism as a
moral evil set the terms of the response for both
compliers and resisters. Most academics tried or
managed to convince themselves that complying
with the witch-hunt did not in fact threaten the
very freedom and democracy that communism
supposedly threatened; resisters who did not flee
abroad or outside academia rarely had the oppor-
tunity to justify their stance successfully.
The third topic explores how, in the aftermath
of his disengagement from political action, Finley
came to see ancient politics as a counter-cultural
utopia to modern elitist politics. P. Cartledge
explores the modern political background of
Finley’s Democracy Ancient and Modern (New
Brunswick and London 1973), and discusses his
work on the teaching of classics through his
involvement with the Joint Association of
Classical Teachers. W. Harris offers a very stimu-
lating reading of Finley’s Politics in the Ancient
World (Cambridge 1983), with particular
emphasis on the ambiguities and inconsistencies
of Finley’s attitude towards class and Marxism.
Finally, T. Jones links together the second and
third topics by exploring how I.F. Stone, another
victim of McCarthyism, came to justify the
304 REVIEWS OF BOOKS
Athenian counter-cultural utopia by vindicating
the Athenian condemnation of Socrates.
The volume is an important addition to our
understanding of Finley’s life and career. Many
questions remain opaque, because the evidence to
answer them no longer exists or still eludes us. But
the volume makes clear the need to reconstruct the
intellectual environment of the study of ancient
history before World War II if we want to under-
stand not only Finley, but much of our current
predicament.
KOSTAS VLASSOPOULOS
University of Nottingham
Konstantinos.Vlassopoulos@nottingham.ac.uk
SIAPKAS (J.) and SJÖGREN (L.) Displaying the
Ideals of Antiquity: The Petrified Gaze.
New York and London: Routledge, 2014. Pp.
242, illus. £80. 9780415529167.
doi:10.1017/S0075426915001214
This book is part of a growing interest in reception
of classical antiquity in museums. It surveys the
current state of display across a range of European
and American museums. This is a massive task for
such a slim volume. It manages to survey an
impressive number, although the depth is (under-
standably) sometimes limited. It concentrates on
the theoretical approach to ancient sculpture
presented in these displays, particularly whether it
measures up to current archaeological under-
standing of this material. Part 1 introduces these
concerns briefly and lays out the structure of the
book.
Part 2 reviews the literature on ancient
sculpture. There are sections on ‘Art historical
discourses’, ‘The study of ancient sculpture’ and
‘Current approaches to ancient sculpture’. The
authors outline a shift from aesthetic and
descriptive approaches to sculpture towards an
interest in historical context, with older techniques
persisting even as new ones critique and replace
them. The ‘current approaches’ section takes the
interesting decision to look at recent PhD theses as
works trying simultaneously to challenge and to
carve out a place in the mainstream. It concludes
that the best work in the discipline is deeply
critical of descriptive techniques and traditional
dating schemes.
Part 3 begins with an exploration of the
histories of museums. This observes that, in spite
of changes over time, museum displays retain
many of their past approaches. It divides past
displays into three categories of discourse:
‘masterpieces’, ‘art historical narratives’ and
‘archaeological displays’. The first two both stress
aesthetics, with the masterpiece discourse
separating and elevating single objects, while art
historical approaches valorize particular artists or
time periods. The third (sometimes problemati-
cally described as ‘scientific’) is interested in
sculpture as historical evidence.
These three categories become headings for
the analysis of current displays. ‘Masterpieces’
explores how display techniques underline the
importance and aesthetic value of individual
sculptures. It also explores the broader reception
of the Venus di Milo and the Nike of Samothrace.
This might have been a chance to reflect on the
way the world beyond the museum modifies our
experience of museum objects, but reads like a list
of pop-culture receptions deemed ‘shallow and
empty of meaning’ (143).
The section on art historical display explores
how museums express traditional notions: canon,
art historical periods and the primacy of the
classical culture. There is a detailed comparison of
the different displays of Parthenon sculpture in
Athens, London and Paris which shows some of
the diversity possible even when using similar
material.
The section on ‘archaeological’ approaches to
sculpture discusses architectural reconstruction
and reconstruction of coloured paint as two ways
that past contexts can be reintroduced to museum
galleries. There is a clear frustration at the
continuing emphasis on aesthetics and the absence
of more archaeological approaches. The notion of
archaeological reconstruction and lost physical
context is stressed, and it comes as no surprise
when the authors reference Quatremère de Quincy
in their concluding remarks to note that there is an
inherent problem with the way museums remove
objects from their original context.
While the authors stress that they are writing as
visitors (informed by a specialist knowledge of
classical archaeology) not as museum profes-
sionals, the lack of a deep engagement with
museology is troubling. Approximately two-thirds
of the book are concerned with literature review
and theoretical background, but there is little
discussion of the ways in which a museum is not
like academic discourse. There is little sense of the
restrictions and opportunities of being such a
visual, object-focused medium or the challenges
of a non-specialist audience. A book that stresses
the importance of social, political and historical