The Muse of History

A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year
How the modern world understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter today.

“This majestic book by Oswyn Murray has been long and eagerly awaited…and its quality and scope exceed expectations.” —Edith Hall, BBC History Magazine

The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which successive generations have reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary worlds. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the conflict between Athens and Sparta became a touchstone in the development of republicanism, and in the nineteenth, Athens came to represent the democratic ideal. Amid the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, the Greeks were imagined in an age of suffering, inspiring defenses against nationalism, Nazism, communism, and capitalism.

Oswyn Murray draws powerful conclusions from this historiography, using the ever-changing narrative of ancient Greece to illuminate grand theories of human society. Analyzing the influence of historians and philosophers including Hegel, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Braudel, Murray also considers how coming generations might perceive the Greeks. Along the way, The Muse of History offers rare behind-the-scenes glimpses of figures who shaped the study of ancient Greece, some devotedly cited to this day and others forgotten. We sit in on a class with Arnaldo Momigliano; meet Moses Finley after his arrival in England; eavesdrop on Paul Veyne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; and rediscover Michel Foucault.

A thrilling work that rewrites established scholarly traditions and locates important ideas in unexpected places, The Muse of History reminds us that the meaning of the past is always made in and for the present.

Elegant and outspoken…[this book] is…a tribute to its writer, who has been one of the most thoughtful ancient historians in Britain over more than half a century. -- Mary Beard Times Literary Supplement
This majestic book by Oswyn Murray has been long and eagerly awaited…and its quality and scope exceed expectations…What makes this book so timely is its publication at a moment when democracies are under such great pressure. -- Edith Hall BBC History Magazine
[Provides] a vast understanding of how a memory of antiquity, always renewed and reinterpreted, has kept us civilized. -- Robert D. Kaplan Wall Street Journal
Shot through with joy, significance, wit, and inspiration…provides a bright, even blazing account of ancient Greek historiography from the Scottish Enlightenment to the twenty-first century…[this] book is as wise and munificent in spirit as any that I have read. -- Richard Davenport-Hines Times Literary Supplement
In…[this book], the culmination of a distinguished career that has spanned six decades, Murray surveys the ways that European historians since the Enlightenment have used ancient Greece as a lens through which to view their own political landscapes. More surprisingly, he intersperses these analyses with personal reminiscences that read like passages from a memoir…[his] determined sleuthing into scholarship’s obscure corners is one of this volume’s most appealing features. -- James Romm Chronicle of Higher Education
The Muse of History is a magisterial and deeply humane testament to the virtues of intellectual open-mindedness, studded with personal anecdotes from a lifetime of scholarship…It remains stubbornly anti-parochial and is characterised by a salutary breadth of vision and a welcome hostility to the often unexamined assumptions of Anglo-Saxon empiricism. -- Henry Day The Literary Review
It is rare that one wants to ascribe beauty to a book by an academic, but this is no academic book (despite being a product of deep scholarship). It is the work of a true lover of his subject, an uomo universale who deserves to speak on behalf of a great cause that is constantly endangered but must never be lost: the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters. -- Daniel Johnson The Critic
Murray does a service to his field of Greek history by showing how this subject is, and will always be, relevant to the times…[this book] presents far more than just ancient Greece; instead, it offers a much wider historiography, adding to its educational and entertaining qualities…engaging and lively. -- Robert S. Davis New York Journal of Books
A learned, humane, and occasionally moving intellectual memoir. -- Spencer A. Klavan Law & Liberty
An invaluable reminder of how much all modern humanists owe to European scholars of the classical world, from the French érudits of the eighteenth century to the eastern European Marxists of the twentieth. Oswyn Murray, a foremost historian of western antiquity, here combines trenchant historiographical analysis with biographical snapshots of a host of colorful and innovative classical scholars, many of whom he knew personally. The Muse of History is written with passion, wit, and the firm conviction that ancient history always has, and always will, be of great importance and interest to us all. -- Suzanne Marchand, author of Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe
In this erudite and elegant book, Oswyn Murray examines how the history of Greece has been written, from the Enlightenment to our own dark time. He follows historians as they travel, to explore Greek sites or to flee persecution; he examines scholarly traditions and institutions as they take shape; he catches new and powerful theses as they crystallize. Above all, he reveals the historians themselves, in all their complex humanity. It’s a marvelous story, full of life and told with wit and warmth. -- Anthony T. Grafton, author of Magus
A fascinating investigation into the diverse ways in which European scholars forged their relationship with the ancient world over three centuries. The Muse of History is a vibrant plea to contextualize European intellectual history. This innovative book offers an unparalleled reflection on the role of ancient history in European culture from the Enlightenment to the present day. -- Pauline Schmitt Pantel, coauthor of A History of Ancient Greece
In this wide-ranging study, Oswyn Murray marshals a lifetime of experience and erudition to examine how historians, politicians, and many others have written and rewritten the history of ancient Greece to suit the changing circumstances, interests, and politics of their own times, from the Enlightenment through the Cold War. This is intellectual history at its best, amply demonstrating how modern authors, famous and forgotten alike, repeatedly and dynamically recast the ancient foundations on which the ideals and the very idea of Western civilization have and continue to be constructed. -- Kenneth Lapatin, Curator of Antiquities, The J. Paul Getty Museum
Our greatest historian of archaic and classical Greece traces the formation and development of Ancient History amidst the often tragic events of post-Enlightenment Europe. A profound, inspiring, and deeply personal book. -- Paul J. Kosmin, Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire

Oswyn Murray is an emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford, and a leading scholar of the ancient world. He has written widely translated books including Early Greece and The Symposion: Drinking Greek Style and is the coeditor of The Oxford History of the Classical World.

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