Born
in Kent 1799 Died in Athens 1875
George
Finlay was a Scottish Philhellene who first
came to Greece in 1823, fought during the War of Independence, and stayed on in
the new state until his death in
1875. Over time, he wrote a comprehensive history of Greece from Roman times up
to and including his own era and was the first to include the Byzantine
interlude as an important part of the Greek historical continuum.(1) While not an impartial observer (what historian
is?), he was an acute and very well informed one.
I was
first 'introduced' to Finlay at the British Consul Library in the 1970s and liked
him immediately. Like me, he was a Scottish Presbyterian somehow grafted on to
the Greek body politic. I admired his acerbic style and, at the time, certainly
didn’t question his point of view or
his prejudices because, in so many ways, they dovetailed so nicely with my own.
Over the years, his histories and articles for periodicals and newspapers emanated
from his home in the heart of 19th century Athens. His house, or one
of them, is still standing at the corner of Thoukididou and Kekropia streets in the Plaka and is one of the few
houses in the area with a marble plaque commemorating its most famous
inhabitant.
His personal life is a mystery although some
letters and a journal exist. He apparently destroyed many personal papers
before his death.(2) Nor did he bequeath his
extensive library to any institution, a practice which was very common at the
time. We know that his wife, Enectar, (whom he called Katherine), was an
Armenian woman (nee Asker) from Constantinople. They married around 1829 and had
a daughter who died at the age of 10 in 1841. Enectar survived him by 17 years.
His
Life
George was born in Kent in
1799 of Scottish Protestant, merchant stock, and spent much of his early life
in Scotland. He studied law in Glasgow and then in Gottingen. Idealism and a
strong sense of adventure brought him to Greece in 1823. He was with Byron on
Cephalonia and during the last months of the poet’s life in Messolonghi; later he
served on the Karteria under his
friend and fellow Philhellene Frank Abney Hastings.
After the war, Finlay did much
to assist the fledgling state. In 1834, at the request of the Prime Minister
Ioannis Kolettis, he took on the role of assistant to the Athenian nomarch to help in the rehabilitation of
Athens. He was a member of the Attica tax commission in the 1840s, took part in
the founding of the Ionian Bank, and supported the founding of the University
and the National Library, all the while working on and revising his history. He
received many honours and titles during his lifetime: Hon. Member of the Royal Society of Literature,
Member of the American Antiquarian Society, Corresponding Member of the
Archaeological Institute at Rome, Knight Gold Cross of the Greek Order of the
Redeemer, and was, for a time, a special correspondent to the London Times.
He was also a land speculator
but so was everyone else in Athens with a little bit of money in their pocket.
He bought land in the area of today’s National Gardens (which was confiscated
by the state much to his chagrin), a home in the Plaka, and a farm in Liosia
near Athens. This latter purchase convinced him that he was a failure as a
gentleman farmer. History would be his métier.
“Fair Greece, Sad
Relic of Departed Worth”…
(Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 11.73.693)
Finlay’s history, while
factually accurate, is imbued with a tone that is the hallmark of so many of
the Greek Philhellenes who chose to write about Greece.
Their beau ideal was ancient Greek excellence, albeit one that had been filtered
through the lens of the European enlightenment. One of the compelling
reasons so many Europeans had supported the Greek cause was their own classical
education and the resulting reverence for ancient Greece. Everyone, Finlay
included, hoped for some sort of revival of
Greece’s ancient glory within the new modern state but, with this in mind, the Greeks
they actually encountered were consistently found wanting. There was a
pervasive moral aspect underlying these
comparisons that might be summed up by ‘present debasement versus the glory
before the Fall’. Finlay often wrote ‘in sorrow’, believing that it was his ‘melancholy task to record the errors and
crimes of those who governed Greece.’ (3)
Three
Typical Finlay Observations:
On freedom fighters: Every Greek chief celebrated his own praises,
on politicians: Their whole souls
were absorbed in Party contests for wealth and power, and on Prime Minister
Kolettis: Nothing but want of personal
courage and honesty prevented him from becoming the first man in Greece.
And so on… The fact that he wrote so well made his criticisms memorable and
quotable.
Writers like Finlay were never
mere observers, but rather didactic advisors whose duty it was not to merely
record but to ‘civilize’ a backward population. It was an attitude shared by
most of the educated Greeks from the diaspora who flooded into Athens after
1830 to help create the new state.
In retrospect, it is easy to
see that the model was flawed. It was a ridiculous ideal to foist on a new
country forged in very different times and under very different circumstances
a view that assumed Greece should somehow be ready for a western, liberal
concept of freedom and still exhibit
the perceived characteristics of their wonderful ancestors. True, there is a kind of inevitability about
this model given the temper of the times, but its adoption has left its mark on
the Greek national psyche: a fierce nostalgia for an ideal past coupled with a
sense of deep inferiority about the present and, one might add, a certain
sensitivity to European ‘advice’ because of the tone in which it has so often
been delivered. (4)
But Finlay did truly did love
Greece and its people deeply: The
strength of the Greek cause lay in the hearts of the people (Book Three). He would write time and
time again that the people simply “never had the good fortune to find a leader
worthy of their cause”.
His History of Greece was
widely read by the foreign community and the Greek intelligensia. For non Greek
speakers, it was their only introduction to Greek history. It was translated by
no less a literary luminary than Alexandros Papadiamantis.
Constantinos Paparrigopoulos, soon
to become Greece’s most influential historian, read and admired it while
composing his own History of the Greek Nation.
But no history is definitive. Finlay (as an outsider) may have been competent
to write a history of Greece, but perhaps not
to write,as Paparrigopoulos planned to do, a history of the 'nation'. (5) Paparrigopoulos
took a different tack and set out to explain the facts of Greek history from a Greek perspective with different philosophical
parameters. The result was more pleasing to a country that was in dire need of
a modern identity that still encompassed its past. (See http://athensfirstcemeteryinenglish.blogspot.com/2018/02/constantinos-paparrigopoulos.html
The Grave
Finlay’s memorial is easy to
find. It is towards the back and the largest in the Protestant section of the
First Cemetery. It is very imposing: a sarcophagus set on a plinth which then
sprouts a stele topped by a bust of the historian – symbolic overkill maybe,
but, still, a real effort to convey his importance. There is even a small ‘temenos’
with a metal surround creating a sense of special grandeur that is somewhat spoiled
by the large garbage bin on its south side. The monument’s height offers Finlay
a view towards the city he lived in and loved for so many years.
Footnotes
(1) He revised
constantly, finishing his history in the 1860s. Volume One on the Greeks under
the Romans, had been published as early as 1844. The final version was published in 1877, two years after his death.
It was entitled A History of Greece (From Its Conquest by the Romans to the
Present Time, B.C.
146 to A.D. 1864) Modern
historians have questioned some of his facts, but no one has seriously
questioned his scholarship or the enormity of his effort. In 2008 the Greek parliament, to honour his
contribution, republished his exhaustive history.
(2) Information kindly
offered by Amalia G. Kakissis | Archivist at the British School in Athens.
(3) I obtained this
quote about his ‘melancholy duty’ from a review of his history in the Saturday
Review, Nov. 9, 1878.
(4) Byron commented often that the Greeks he met
were not suited for a modern state although he had hope that they might make a ‘suitable
colony’ or be a ‘useful dependency’ for some European nation. Chateaubriand had
lamented in the same vein: “this sacred soil filled with past greatness and
present debasement”, etc. Google David Roessal’s In Byron’s Shadow:Modern
Greece in the English and American Imagination for more in the same vein.
(5) See David Rick's "The Making of Modern Greece". It raises some interesting questions...
(5) See David Rick's "The Making of Modern Greece". It raises some interesting questions...
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