George Finlay

         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 19^th 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...