The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present

“For the interested casual reader who loves history, The Muse of History is a worthy read . . .”

We live in a golden age of great scholars of the ancient world writing serious but entertaining books for a general audience. Oswyn Murray, in The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century, does a service to his field of Greek history by showing how this subject is, and will always be, relevant to the times.

Everyone accepts the importance of ancient Greece, but few understand it. Murray argues that with history in general, “none of us can understand the past except through our own contemporary distorting mirror.” The author supports the “creation of a joint School of Ancient and Modern History.”

The Muse of History presents far more than just ancient Greece; instead, it offers a much wider historiography, adding to its educational and entertaining qualities. Modern ideas of empire, imperialism, and liberty come from Enlightenment views of the Roman Republic and Empire, based on Greek ideals and ideas.

English publications of Josephus’ histories, the contrast of Athenian democracy/chaos with Spartan culture (or lack thereof), the polis, and “the problem of Socrates” are among the many topics. The author also compares histories and historical novels of the time “in historical method” and connects with art, fiction, music, mythology, and poetry as subjects. Sometimes, Ancient Greece is left behind in The Muse of History.

The work of such scholars remains relevant. Much of the narrative brings to light a not-lost history but entertaining sketches of undeservingly forgotten (sometimes ignored) scholars and their adventures in scholarship. The “lost historian,” John Gast, published his work in the late 1700s at the beginning of a new age of historical writing. As Murray writes of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), “this book still shapes and challenges all subsequent attempts to explain the central phenomenon in European history.”

Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) in the Age of Revolutions blends the ancient past with modern reality. Murray also includes how these historians of Ancient Greece looked at slavery and women in the debates on liberty at that time, which were part of the beginnings of great movements.

For the interested casual reader who loves history, The Muse of History is a worthy read; for someone beginning a serious study of Western Civilization or World History, it is a solid beginning and will be a valuable reference work. As with the Greeks, the author also reminds us of German scholarship's significant contributions to thought on the individual, liberty, philosophy, and unorthodox theology.

Many familiar names appear in unexpected contexts, and The Muse of History includes several colorful scholars from different walks of life. The great (and controversial) scholar Gilbert Murray (no relation to the author) was even the basis of characters, sometimes portrayed unflatteringly, in the theater.

The Muse of History relates how the Warburg Institute and other great collections, scholars, and scholarship were saved during European civilization’s darkest days of World War II. Again, the present becomes mixed with the ancient past. This epic tome includes some of the author’s interesting personal experiences, such as his time at Chastleton House, a place colorful for anything but its history.

Murray uses formal modern scholarship from “obscure places” in those writings to reach a broader audience while offering ideas from the history of how they have been presented and told. Beyond the study of Ancient Greece, the author documents how historians have gone from the legendary and the literal to having greater views of the large and small, some of which were lost in time until then.

The author, for example, describes Fernand Braudel as “the greatest historian of the twentieth century.” This French scholar saw “the centrality of the individual as the subject of history: not the individual great man but the anonymous yet real peasant.” He also saw European history in broad groups, including the Ancient Greeks.

Oswyn Murray writes so enthusiastically that sometimes the reader may need to pause to understand the intended meaning, but the writing is engaging and lively. Even the acknowledgments show the extraordinary breadth of his research. This book is extensively annotated and has illustrations.