Oswyn Murray

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 marvellous story, full of life and told with wit and warmth

Oswyn Murray, a foremost historian of western antiquity, here combines trenchant historiographical analysis with biographical snapshots of a host of colourful 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

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 Kosmin, author of Time and its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire

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 continued to be constructed

Kenneth Lapatin, Curator of Antiquities, The Paul J. Getty Museum

A quietly amazing book, written with an elegance and insight worthy of his mentor Arnaldo Momigliano

Nino Luraghi, Wykeham Professor of Greek History, University of Oxford

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 ... characterised by a salutary breadth of vision and a welcome hostility to the often unexamined assumptions of Anglo-Saxon empiricism

Fascinating ... no other historian can match this achievement; no other war, or for that matter no other historical subject, is so much the product of its reporter

Majestic ... enthalling ... places centre-stage the multifarious evaluations and (mis)understandings of Athenian democracy that have marched in tandem with our own history since the Enlightenment [and] reveals Murray’s unwavering commitment to the need for history to continue to be written ... no other practitioner of the discipline has ever reflected with such synoptic intensity on the relationship between real-world contemporary historical developments

Both elegant and outspoken ... It has long been one of Murray's priorities to liberate the Republic of of Letters, or at least the Republic of History, from the constraints of national or linguistic boundaries. His new book is part autobiographical memoir, part analysis of how the subject of ancient Greek history has changed since the eighteenth century, and part manifesto for classical history and the study of history more generally ... A masterclass [from] one of the most thoughtful ancient historians in Britain over more than half a century.

The Muse of History by classicist Oswyn Murray takes as its conceit the Ancient Greeks as the inspiration for Western historical thought since the Enlightenment. Perhaps unfashionable in some quarters of academia, the book is a joy to read, thought-provoking and amusing. It’s a lifetime of work but provides a wealth of education for a dullard like me

The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present

The study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture in the twentieth century under totalitarian persecutions. Through the study of different historians, many of them unjustly forgotten, it shows the problematic nature of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the importance of ideas from the continent of Europe, the ambiguities of democracy, and the impossibility of understanding the past or the present outside our common European heritage. It ends by offering suggestions for the future of the study of the Greeks in the context of world history.

Oswyn Murray

Praise for The Muse of History

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 ...

Oswyn Murray, a foremost historian of western antiquity, here combines trenchant historiographical analysis with biographical snapshots of a host of colourful and innovative classical scholars, many of whom he knew ...

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 b ...

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 ...

Oswyn Murray, a foremost historian of western antiquity, here combines trenchant historiographical analysis with biographical snapshots of a host of colourful and innovative classical scholars, many of whom he knew ...

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 b ...

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 ...

Oswyn Murray, a foremost historian of western antiquity, here combines trenchant historiographical analysis with biographical snapshots of a host of colourful and innovative classical scholars, many of whom he knew ...

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 b ...

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