In Memory of Moses and Mary Finley
Like 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, the Proceedings, 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 the Annales that the paper was published.