The Muse of History

Reviews / Votes

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 erudits 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 <i>Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe</i> 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 <i>Magus</i> 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 <i>A History of Ancient Greece</i> 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, <i> Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire</i>