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

Is all history history of the present, or is the past “another country,” to be valued for its otherness? If “presentism” runs the risk of navel-gazing, does the cultivation of a past that is alien to us make history irrelevant? Murray's magisterial history of (mainly ancient) historiography, from the Enlightenment to now, asks the big questions without skimping on the characters, institutions, and friendships that lie behind them.Particularly alert throughout to differences in national historiographical traditions, Murray argues that “America has never ceased to believe in the modernity of the past, holding that every modern problem from democracy to slavery, color prejudice, feminism, and the New Right has its analogue in the ancient world.” France and England, by contrast, have tried to maintain a distance from the past, “precisely because both cultures have felt themselves so close to the ancient world.” (Discuss!)Playing across national traditions is what Murray refers to as “the Republic of letters.” German scholarship and ideas about the research university spread across Europe in the nineteenth century to confound the outmoded project of George Eliot's Casaubon, with his “Key to All Mythologies” in Middlemarch. As we get closer to the time of his own days as a student and early career scholar in Oxford of the 1960s, Murray gives us a lengthy and vivid account of the effect of the arrival on the English scene of refugee scholars from Italy and Germany in the Thirties and Forties, and from the US in the Fifties. “The greatest gathering of humanist scholarship of Europe since the Council of Florence of 1439” is his judgment, while the natives referred to the new arrivals condescendingly as “the Bund.” Murray is under no illusions about the lazy conservatism of the intellectual life that they encountered in Oxford, which persisted into the early years of his own career. His account of the typical Oxbridge academic career is hilarious and unsparing.What moderns find interesting about the ancient world undergoes changes. In the eighteenth century, it was the contrast, and political choice, between Athens and Sparta that occupied historians. In the early nineteenth century, Barthold Niebuhr's “ballad theory” of the origins of Roman history appealed to the Romantics. By the twentieth century, a distinctive archaic age of ancient Greece was recognized, which raised the question of what it took for democracy to emerge in classical Athens. Murray's own orientation is clear from the heroes of his book: Jacob Burckhardt, Arnaldo Momigliano, Fernand Braudel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. This roster of predecessors puts him firmly in the camp of those who think that the stuff of history is geography, cultural systems, and what the French call mentalités, rather than events and great men.Murray throws into his narrative many fascinating diversions, one of which is a discussion of the metaphorical uses of palimpsest after Angelo Mai discovered classical texts written under manuscripts used for Christian writing in 1814. Coleridge, in 1829, for instance, writes of “the palimpsest tablet of my memory,” and the figure has had a long life. Along with palimpsest, ancient history has also endowed us with the term oligarchy. Murray predicts that the twenty-first century will be known as the Age of Oligarchy, following a twentieth century that was the Age of (Pseudo)-Democracy. (Again: Discuss!)