Gazing Into the Mirror of History

“Greek literature contains the germs of almost everything, so you can treat of almost all tendencies in treating of it,” the Hellenist Gilbert Murray wrote in the year 1900. One and a quarter centuries later, Murray’s unrelated namesake, the Oxford emeritus professor Oswyn Murray, demonstrates that much the same can be said about Greek history. In his far-ranging study The Muse of History, 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.

Murray acknowledges the unusual breadth of this book’s scope in his introduction. “At one level,” he writes, “my book is a history of the study of Greek history from...the 18th century to the present day.” But, since many modern historians have themselves been a part of history, as in the case of Jewish scholars driven out by the Nazis, “at a deeper level this book is a study of modern history and how it is conditioned by the past as much as the present.” Add to this two-part formulation the author’s own tales of youthful encounters with these exiles from central Europe, his personal bildungsroman, and a sprinkling of his pointed political aperçus, and you have a sense of the farrago this book contains.

“The Western traditions of ancient world history rest on the 18th-century foundations established by the Enlightenment,” Murray asserts, and thus his survey begins, after a tip of the hat to Thomas Hobbes’s 1629 translation of Thucydides, in the early 1700s. Moving rapidly through a gallery of biographical portraits in his initial chapters, he preserves the fame of nearly-forgotten scholars — George Dunbar, William Robertson, John Gast, among many others — and samples their writings in liberal block quotations. This portion of the book is something of a catalogue raisonné of British Hellenists of yore, tied together by recurring themes, among them the ideological contest between ancient Athens and Sparta. Murray demonstrates how Athens, for a long time deemed the loser in this contest, first emerged as victor in the Recherches Philosophiques sur les Grecs of Cornelius de Pauw, a now-obscure Dutch writer of the late 18th century.

De Pauw’s work appeared just after the French Revolution, and, in a clear demonstration of Murray’s thesis that “all history is contemporary history,” its glowing portrait of the Athenian system was deemed subversive outside France. An English translator quoted by Murray tried to counter de Pauw’s pro-Athenian bias by pointing out flaws in the Greek democratic system and castigating its tendency toward “laocracy,” or mob rule. Here, and in several subsequent chapters of Murray’s survey, the French Revolution looms large: All Europe, and especially England, saw reflections of France in ancient Athens, and depictions of Greek democracy varied widely depending on which side of the barricades the author stood on.

De Pauw served as abbot of the German town of Xanten and Murray admits that he has “not investigated the cathedral or civic archives” there, a rare instance where he has left a stone unturned. Murray’s determined sleuthing into scholarship’s obscure corners is one of this volume’s most appealing features. In one chapter he relates how he stumbled on a record of a little-known 1837 volume of history, Athens: Its Rise and Fall by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (better known as the author of historical romance novels like The Last Days of Pompeii). After tracking down and perusing the work, which he found to be “the first serious radical history of Greece in modern Europe,” he determined that it had fallen into obscurity only because it was never completed. He then managed to locate a manuscript copy of Bulwer-Lytton’s unpublished final volume — and got it published! This is only the most dramatic of several important archival finds that Murray describes in this book, in accounts that attest to his tireless, rigorous research.

As The Muse of History moves forward in time, it broadens its initially British focus to include scholars from all across continental Europe. An admiring portrait of Jacob Burckhardt, whom Murray addresses as “a lifelong friend and teacher,” dominates a segment on 19^th-century German historical research. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano, who became Murray’s actual teacher after leaving fascist Italy for Oxford, is amply and warmly profiled in two of the chapters exploring the 20th century. Recent French classicists and philosophers, including Jean-Pierre Vernant, Fernand Braudel and Michel Foucault, are variously assessed.

North American historians are absent from this Eurocentric study, apart from a few offhand remarks. For Murray, Greek history belongs fundamentally to “our common European heritage” and the classical tradition is vital “for the defence of European culture.” He speaks of an “ancient Republic of Letters” that he joined when he became a classicist, envisioning a community that once did, and might again, bridge the gaps between nations and ideologies, especially those that opened during the Cold War and have not yet closed. Murray laments the degree to which an iron curtain divides his field; he describes the study of Greek history as “a hall of mirrors, in which both Western and Eastern scholars have stared at their own reflections.” Both see versions of themselves in the glass, just as other opposing blocs, such as the Axis and Allied powers in the Second World War, have done in the past.

Murray himself has done much to bridge the divide. In personal reminiscences he relates how, having come of age during the Cold War, he grew estranged from nationalist causes and devoted himself to helping dissident scholars in Eastern Europe. His tales of friendships forged across the chasm between East and West, and efforts to save oppressed scholars from persecution, occupy much of the book’s final chapters, which have a valedictory tone. “When I look back in my 80s I feel that I have tried to uphold the traditions of the ancient Republic of Letters,” Murray writes. Along the way he recounts his own thumbnail-sketch life story, relating how he began his study of history after a dispiriting stint in Egypt as a soldier assigned to Britain’s Suez intervention.

If there is a single through-line to this multifaceted book, it lies in Murray’s rejection of a positivist approach to antiquity that renders its practitioners “mere technicians of the trivial fact.” Murray associates this positivism primarily with Great Britain and mentions the Cambridge Ancient History, a standard reference work, as an example of its sterility. The danger of assembling facts without a theoretical framework, as Murray sees it, is that these so-called facts get distorted to fit nationalist narratives of the kind that, since the late 19^th century, have often torn Europe apart. “Without theory, we simply see ourselves in the mirror of history,” he writes, again invoking the metaphor of glass-gazing.

“I have tried to present my thought as a whole,” Murray insists in his introduction, but The Muse of History is clearly made up of inquiries that initially stood alone. Its parts do not always cohere, but each offers something of value to readers, whether they are students of history or, as we all are, its prisoners.