Moses Finley

I thought it would be worthwhile reading a sentence each from the introductory paragraphs that we provide for you in the problem to show you the range of opinion that is pretty representative of what scholars think or have thought on the subject.

Moses Finley says, if then the world of Odysseus is to be placed in time as everything we know from the comparative study of heroic poetry says it must, the most likely centuries seem to be the tenth and the ninth, that is to say what we call the dark ages.

Anthony Andrews says, it may be that the epic tradition had at some stage used as a model for the army before Troy, an idealized version of some of those bands of colonists who settled the coast of Asia Minor in post-Mycenaean times.

If you look at the whole story that he tells, that really means quite soon after the fall of the Mycenaean world.

The law dictated that pain was the only mechanism that could produce truth from a subjugated body.

It is a horrific realization of how deeply embedded the ideology of domination was, and this ties directly into the broader historical consensus, doesn't it? Historians like Moses Finley and Deborah Kamen have argued that this isn't just a dark footnote in Athenian history.

Finley's thesis is essential here.

He argued that Athenian democracy was structurally inextricably tied to coerced labor.

So let's come back to where we started with Homer.

Back in the mid-20th century, the historian Moses Finley argued that Homer is no reliable witness to the Bronze Age.

So now that we know what Bronze Age religion actually looked like in Greece, how much of it survived into Homer? Let's start with what he gets right.

One of the most striking connections starts with Pylos.