How the modern world has understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter today

The study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture in the twentieth century under totalitarian persecutions. Through the study of different historians, many of them unjustly forgotten, it shows the problematic nature of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the importance of ideas from the continent of Europe, the ambiguities of democracy, and the impossibility of understanding the past or the present outside our common European heritage. It ends by offering suggestions for the future of the study of the Greeks in the context of world history.

"Both elegant and outspoken ... It has long been one of Murray's priorities to liberate the Republic of of Letters, or at least the Republic of History, from the constraints of national or linguistic boundaries. His new book is part autobiographical memoir, part analysis of how the subject of ancient Greek history has changed since the eighteenth century, and part manifesto for classical history and the study of history more generally ... A masterclass [from] one of the most thoughtful ancient historians in Britain over more than half a century" - Times Literary Supplement

"A magisterial and deeply humane testament to the virtues of intellectual open-mindedness, studded with personal anecdotes from a lifetime of scholarship ... characterised by a salutary breadth of vision and a welcome hostility to the often unexamined assumptions of Anglo-Saxon empiricism" - Literary Review

"Majestic ... enthalling ... places centre-stage the multifarious evaluations and (mis)understandings of Athenian democracy that have marched in tandem with our own history since the Enlightenment [and] reveals Murray’s unwavering commitment to the need for history to continue to be written ... no other practitioner of the discipline has ever reflected with such synoptic intensity on the relationship between real-world contemporary historical developments’" - BBC History Magazine

"Fascinating... no other historian can match this achievement; no other war, or for that matter no other historical subject, is so much the product of its reporter ... the book is a joy to read, thought-provoking and amusing. It’s a lifetime of work but provides a wealth of education" - Aspects of History, Books of the Year

"Splendid ... The Muse of History is throughout curious and humane, so that the reader keeps wishing to learn more about Murray’s subject—the modern writing of history of the Greeks, especially with an eye to Britain—as well as about Murray himself. Both wishes are amply granted ... [the book has] the aphoristic brilliance of the 18th century, the novelistic sense of character of the 19th, the methodological sophistication of the 20th. It is a fitting summa of those centuries of historical writing" - Bryn Mawr Classical Review