In Memory of Moses and Mary FinleyLike many of its brothers in ambiguity, ‘the Black Hunter’ has a double birthday. Like the First international, it is a French child educated in England. As ‘Le Chasseur Noir’, this paper was first given in Paris, on 6 February 1967, at the Association pour l'Encouragement des Etudes Grecques, and, a year later (15 February 1968), in Cambridge at the Philological Society. I owe it to the truth to say that in Paris the audience remained mute. In Cambridge, on the contrary, there was a lively discussion, not only among the classicists but also with no less an anthropologist than Edmund Leach, now Sir Edumnd. A few months later the paper was first published in Cambridge, on the initiative of the late Denys Page, in a translation by Janet Lloyd and with a dedication to the late Moses Finley, and a little later in Paris. One may easily note here a structural opposition in the form of a chiasmus: in Cambridge, in the University where eminent classicists – Jane Harrison, Francis MacDonald Cornford – were also anthropologists, it was in a purely philological publication, theProceedings, that the paper was published. In Paris, where the anthropological tradition of classical studies remained, with Louis Gernet and Henri Jeanmaire, and, more recently, with Jean-Pierre Vernant, outside the University proper, it was in theAnnalesthat the paper was published.
