The Present of the Past
The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present by Oswyn Murray (Belknap Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
Helen of Troy was allegedly the most captivating woman of all time, but ancient Greece may be the most captivating era of all time. We seem to always want to know more about it and it has been that way for centuries. We measure ourselves by its heroes and its philosophers, we have revived its ancient games, and we have attempted to model some of our social and political systems on aspects of ancient Greece. We are not only interested in ancient Greece, we are invested in it. As a result, some of our explorations of the Greeks are just as much about us as they are about anyone else.
The Muse of History covers “the ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present.” These are the Greeks as seen from different vantage points in time because, as Oswyn Murray reminds us, “all history is and has always been written in and for the present” (12). Shifts in the historiography of ancient Greece tell us something about the decipherment of languages and discovery of new archaeological evidence, but the emphases in Greek history also tell us about the time period in which that history was written. Some ages and authors have celebrated the virtues of Sparta, others of Athens. Some ages have been more aware of the significance of the polis than others. There are breakthroughs and revelations, such as when Burckhardt and Nietzsche grasped the ‘agonal’ aspects of Greek culture, but those insights also provide revelations about the discoverers, not just the discovered.
As The Muse of History explores the history of the Greeks, it nicely doubles as a sort of history of history and, to some extent, a history of the West. This is entirely intentional. We learn how people have told the story of ancient Greece and how people have used history, a narrative about the past, to orient themselves in the present. As Oswyn Murray writes: “My aim in this book is to raise for all students of history, not just for historians of the ancient world, the questions of the relativity of historical narrative and its relation to the possibility of a theory of human society” (7).
This book reflects Oswyn Murray’s 60 years of study and his years of eminence at Oxford. It covers an incredible range of historians, some well-known in the field, like George Grote, others essentially unknown, like John Gast, and others significant to the field while being better known for something else, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In addition to UK authors, Murray illuminates the significant German scholarship in the field and the debates within it. The book also includes French authors, especially twentieth century, like J.-P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, among others. Along the way, Murray gives some insight into the lives of the various historians and shares interesting anecdotes.
The Muse of History is not a “heroes and villains” narrative, or a Whig history of continual improvement in the understanding of ancient Greece, nor a judgment cast on the historians of the past. It is an effort to “reflect on how earlier historians have approached the past” (6). Each historian is assessed and various approaches are explained. Some authors are raised from obscurity and others’ views are affirmed. Limitations are also acknowledged and every historian is considered in context.
At times, the book may read a bit antiquarian. For example, early on, Murray is exploring the work of the forgotten historian John Gast, down to letters with his publisher. Even the examination of Bulwer-Lytton’s book reads, at first, somewhat obscure, considering that so few people are familiar with his history. However, in every case, Murray connects the detail to a larger argument and shows the significance of even seemingly obscure works. In some cases, credit is given where it is due in the historiography, perhaps for the first time. Yet The Muse of History also makes an argument for antiquarianism. In the final chapter, Murray writes that “there is an irreducible element of antiquarianism in all true historians, a natural love of the empirical and a curiosity about the facts and events of the past” (426). Antiquarianism alone is not history, but antiquarianism is an aspect of history.
The Muse of History is an interesting bridge between past and present. When he reached retirement at Balliol, Oswyn Murray described himself as part of “the last generation of automatic classicists, coming from an era when a relatively high proportion of the brighter schoolboys and girls was channelled into Classical VI forms and on to Oxford or Cambridge.” But The Muse of History also demonstrates the bridge between past and present in the Republic of Letters. Many books stop considering the Republic of Letters in the nineteenth century, but Murray identifies members and links from the eighteenth century until now. He wonders about the future of the Republic of Letters in the twenty-first century, as it faces “the triumph of ruthless capitalism and nationalism” (417). In the end, he does not decide what he thinks the future will be, but suggests “only the next generation can answer that question: ‘through suffering we learn wisdom: pathei mathos’” (417).
The tone of The Muse of History is familiar in many ways. Murray seems familiar with anyone with any significance in the field. Murray also occasionally uses first person, or includes his own relevant experience or relationship. Works of historiography rarely have a first-person narrative, but, in this case, it is not undesirable. In every instance, it seems to add to the text rather than detract. Occasionally, the tone is even familial, as it is when he references his “great-grandfather Sir James Murray (no relation to Gilbert Murray), the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary” who opted out of the propagandistic “Reply to German Professors” during the Great War (267). Throughout the book, one can appreciate Murray’s presence in the narrative.
To many people, history probably seems like a dry discipline with isolated practitioners caught up in the past, surrounded by facts, dusty archives, and multivolume works. The Muse of History is a powerful testament to the importance of relationships among historians. The chapters show the ways in which different thinkers interacted as scholars and academics. But Murray also shows us the role of historians in helping each other (and their work) get out of continental Europe during the rise of fascism and the start of World War II. The later chapters turn to Murray’s own engagement with scholars from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, including his establishment of Bibliotecha Academica Translationum. That research program sought “to create a database of all translations of works of classical scholarship between all European languages” and operated by offering “travel awards to young scholars across Europe, so that they could work on the project in their own and in foreign libraries” (414). At key points in the past, the Republic of Letters has sought to help its members caught behind various political borderlines and The Muse of History proves the significance of the coherence of that republic.
One other way we see the role of relationships in The Muse of History is in the significance of certain professors. For example, the chapters involving Jacob Burckhardt not only review his historical insights, but his firm belief in the importance of teaching (even over writing), and we can see the chain of thinkers connected to his work. Murray also describes Burckhardt’s relationship with his younger colleague, Friedrich Nietzsche. Murray’s chapters involving Arnaldo Momigliano not only explain his significance in the history of ancient Greece, but the way in which he shaped Murray’s own scholarship and sense of responsibility to other scholars. Few books which engage scholarship so closely also develop the importance of professors and students.
One perhaps unintended, and hardly central but still curious, question raised by the book is the significance of Walter Scott. Murray very convincingly shows how influential Walter Scott was on many historians and authors. Yet it seems unlikely that students of history today read any Walter Scott, especially not in their history studies. Perhaps students studying historiography should read more influential figures who are technically outside of the field, like Walter Scott.
The book ends with present considerations on the way in which we tell the story of the past in the present. He addresses the crisis of theory in history, but his greater concern is relativism. He writes that “Relativism, like skepticism in the seventeenth century, has become to my mind the crucial problem for the student of history: its aim is to neutralize the power of history, to subordinate it to the prevailing ideology of the present” (419). To his mind, it has taken two forms, “the idea that history is rhetoric” (419) and “a sort of universalization of scientific relativism” (420). As a counter to the first, Murray agrees with his mentor Momigliano that history is “a science with a method,” but differs “from modern science in being more like philosophy—a discourse in which the individual thinker or historian has the benefit over the research group” (420). History has a method, a techne, and it is more than rhetoric. In response to the second form of relativism, Murray writes that “however many narratives are ideologically biased, even if all known narratives suffer from observer distortion, this does not imply that there is no reality to be observed; and even if we cannot be certain of the facts in such a situation it is still reasonable to keep on searching” (421).
In the final chapter, Murray also emphasizes why we study and write history. We do it to satisfy our “desire for truth” and “in order to understand the present” (426). We also use history “to enable the individual to escape from the intolerableness of the present” and “to influence the present” (427). With a perspective akin to James Baldwin, Murray writes that “to understand the past is to liberate ourselves from it, and to enable ourselves to plan a rational future unencumbered by the dead beliefs and charter myths of an earlier generation” (427). It matters very much how we do history because history matters in many ways.
The past of the ancient Greeks is now long distant, but the history of ancient Greece reaches our chronological doorstep: the present. The Muse of History is just over 400 pages, but it covers almost 400 years. Its account of the history of the ancient Greeks is interesting not only for classicists and historians of ancient Greece, but for people interested in the field of history generally. One of the chief questions that the Greeks have left us is, “What is the good life?” In The Muse of History, Oswyn Murray shows that the study and practice of history can be a meaningful part of the good life.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
