Enfilade

From Penguin Books and Harvard UP’s Belknap Press:

Oswyn Murray, The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2024), 528 pages, ISBN: 978-0674297456, £30 / $38.

The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which successive generations have reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary worlds. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the conflict between Athens and Sparta became a touchstone in the development of republicanism, and in the nineteenth, Athens came to represent the democratic ideal. Amid the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, the Greeks were imagined in an age of suffering, inspiring defenses against nationalism, Nazism, communism, and capitalism.

Oswyn Murray is an emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford, and a leading scholar of the ancient world. He has written widely translated books including Early Greece and The Symposion: Drinking Greek Style and is the coeditor of The Oxford History of the Classical World.

c o n t e n t s

Part One | The Muse of History

Introduction: Past and Present

The Republic of Letters
1  The Western Traditions of Ancient History
2  Enlightenment Greece: Sparta versus Athens
3  Ireland Invents Greek History: The Lost Historian John Gast
4  The Philhellenes and Marathon

Radical History
5  The Contested Reign of Mitford
6  Romantic History in Britain and Europe
7  Utilitarian History: Mill and Grote

The Triumph of Germany
8  Hegel, Niebuhr, and Critical History
9  Burckhardt and Cultural History
10  The Archaic Age
11  The Problem of Socrates
12  In Search of the Key to All Mythologies

Part Two | The Angel of History

The Crisis of the Republic of Letters
13  The Repentance of Gilbert Murray
14  Saving Civilization: The Warburg Institute and the SPSL
15  Momigliano on Peace and Liberty
16  Momigliano in England

The School of Paris
17  Fernand Braudel and the Mediterranean
18  The ‘École de Paris’

Unfnished Business
19  Dark Times: The Cold War and the Triumph of Capitalism 391
20  The Crisis of Theory in History

Acknowledgements
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index