M. I. Finley (1912-1986), the son of Nathan Finkelstein and
Anna Katzellenbogen, was born in New York City. He graduated from
Syracuse University at the age of fifteen and received an MA in
public law from Columbia, before turning to the study of ancient
history. During the thirties, Finley taught at Columbia and City
College and developed an interest in the sociology of the ancient
world that was shaped in part by his association with members of
the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952,
when he was teaching at Rutgers, Finley was summoned before the
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever
been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to answer,
invoking the Fifth Amendment; by the end of the year he had been
fired from the university by a unanimous vote of its trustees.
Unable to find work in the US, Finley moved to England, where he
taught for many years at Cambridge, helping to redirect the focus
of classical education from a narrow emphasis on philology to a
wider concern with culture, economics, and society. He became a
British subject in 1962 and was knighted in 1979. Among Finley’s
best-known works are The Ancient Economy, Ancient Slavery and
Modern Ideology, and The World of Odysseus.
Bernard Knox (1914–2010) was an English classicist. He was
the first director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in
Washington, DC. Among his many books are The Heroic Temper,
The Oldest Dead White European Males, and Backing into the
Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal. He is the editor
of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote the
introductions and notes for Robert Fagles’s translations of
the Iliad and the Odyssey.
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