The Last Generation

In​ an essay on scholarly ‘necrophilia’, published in 2021, the historian of science Lorraine Daston noted that writing histories of their own disciplines is often an excuse for scholars to commune with ghosts. Not just any ghosts, either, but their academic forebears. Daston connects this longing to the intense bonds forged by traditional institutions of humanistic education. Places such as the medieval universitas magistrorum et scholarium, the early modern English public school or the 19th-century German research seminar generated deep loyalties. Devotion to the academic community often equalled or even supplanted family ties, leading academics to ‘envision their own histories as ersatz genealogies, in which the bonds of master and disciple replace those of kith and kin, and the filiation of ideas retraces the biographies of thinkers’. This is the reason, Daston argues, ‘despite repeated efforts in both scholarship and science since the early 19th century to sunder life and works, all disciplines reconstruct their own histories as bloodlines and lifelines.’

Classics, as Daston points out, has done this with particular fervency, and nowhere more so than in Oxford. When Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor of Greek from 1960 until 1989, published a collection of essays on the history of his discipline, he called it Blood for the Ghosts, referring not only to the necromantic scene in Homer’s Odyssey but also to a celebrated speech on Greek historical writing delivered by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the most famous German classicist of his generation, on a visit to Oxford in 1908. Now Oswyn Murray, who retired twenty years ago after a long career teaching ancient history at Oxford, has produced a collection of historiographic essays also dedicated dis manibus, to the spirits of the departed.

Murray, who turned 87 this year, is the last survivor of a triumvirate of scholars who directed the teaching of classics at Balliol College during the final decades of the 20th century. His tenure as tutorial fellow in ancient history, which stretched from 1968 to 2004, was outstripped by that of his colleague Jasper Griffin, who became a fellow in 1961, having also been an undergraduate at Balliol (their younger colleague Oliver Lyne, who arrived at Balliol in 1971, died unexpectedly in post in 2005). In an article published in Balliol’s alumni newsletter in 2004 to mark his and Griffin’s retirement, Murray wrote: ‘We are the last generation of automatic classicists, coming from an era when a relatively high proportion of the brighter schoolboys and girls was channelled into Classical VI forms and on to Oxford and Cambridge.’

Murray’s Oxford connections go back even further. As he says in The Muse of History, he is the great-grandson of the lexicographer James Augustus Henry Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the son and grandson of senior civil servants. This genealogy of scholarly and public service is important to the book, in which questions of kinship and filiation – whether of the blood or the intellect – run deep. Although nominally a collection of essays on the writing of ancient history, some new and some previously published, The Muse of History is most rewarding if read as a memoir: an ancient (in the true sense, Murray jokes) historian’s attempt to gather the threads of his intellectual formation and offer a portrait of himself and his discipline.

To understand this book requires some grasp of the symbolic freight of ‘Balliol classics’ for Murray’s generation. One of Oxford’s oldest colleges, in the 19th century Balliol transformed itself, through a combination of sound financial management and open fellowship examinations, from a struggling institution with declining student numbers into the university’s pre-eminent academic college. Under a series of progressive masters, including Benjamin Jowett, Balliol adopted aspects of the new, relatively meritocratic and non-denominational culture of professionalism that was reshaping Victorian British elites, and encouraged many of its best students to take public exams in the recently established Honours Schools. This meant that the college’s graduates were well positioned to sit the open civil service exams, which were introduced in the second half of the century and weighted in favour of the knowledge and capacities inculcated by the Oxford classics course, known formally as Literae Humaniores and popularly as ‘Greats’. In the 1850s Jowett had lobbied politicians for Oxford to secure ‘a share in the Indian appointments’; by the end of his life, in 1893, his wish was close to being fulfilled. As W.H. Walsh notes in the History of the University of Oxford, ‘in the period from 1892 to 1914 almost half the entrants to the Imperial Civil Service were Oxford graduates, with the consequence that by 1938 six out of the eight provincial governors in India were Greats men who had taken their degrees between 1897 and 1910.’ Balliol also produced a string of politicians, including Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath.

Murray’s family may not have been Balliol men (he was the third generation of his family to study across the road at Exeter College), but their scholarly and civil service genealogy conforms to its ethos, and Murray hints at a close connection with his revelation, in the caption to a photograph of his great-grandfather, that James Murray named his youngest son ‘Jowett’. The nexus of Oxford classics and imperial power is crucial to explaining what may otherwise strike readers as a bewildering idiosyncrasy of this book: its story of the modern historiography of ancient history is often told as if Oxford were the centre of the intellectual world. What makes it so fascinating is that this perspective is tempered by a strong cosmopolitanism, at least as it extends to French, German and Italian historical thought. One of Murray’s arguments concerns the intellectually limited and derivative character of anglophone historical writing, which in his view has failed to develop any theoretical or conceptual sophistication except when enriched by European intellectual currents. As well as demonstrating ‘the centrality of the study of the ancient world for the understanding of both English and Continental literature and thought [over] three centuries’, Murray wants to show ‘the impossibility of understanding the past or the present outside our common European heritage, and our debt to this heritage in the past and the future’. Such a broad, serious and fundamentally political claim makes this book more than mere necromancy. Filial piety plays a role, but Murray has his eye on bigger themes, including the purpose of historical study and the future (if it has one; Murray is pessimistic on that point) of the Anglo-European – he calls it the ‘Western’ – tradition of ancient history.

Taking as his epigraph Benedetto Croce’s maxim that ‘all history is contemporary history,’ Murray proposes that Western European historiography of ancient Greece and Rome since the 18th century has revolved around two concepts, ‘imperialism’ and ‘liberty’. Ancient history, he argues, was a mode of reflection on contemporary social and political problems: the decline of monarchic models of government, the growth of overseas power and the challenges of imperial administration, and the advance of liberal and democratic political ideas and movements. To illustrate the way this played out in practice he analyses the competing paradigms of ancient Athens and Sparta in 18th-century European political thought, Romantic philhellenism and the Grecian histories of politically active men of letters such as William Mitford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, John Stuart Mill and George Grote.

Relating the historical writing of 19th-century liberals and utilitarians to their political battles isn’t a new approach, and conceptually these are some of the least original parts of the book, with Murray content to add details and flourishes to the outline established by his PhD supervisor, Arnaldo Momigliano. Murray adopts many of Momigliano’s framings, such as the idea that modern historical research arose from the 18th-century methodological encounter of philosophes and érudits, although he adds another portrait to the ancestral gallery: ‘the lost historian John Gast’, an 18th-century Irish scholar whose laborious synthetic history of ancient Greece was eventually eclipsed by Grote and Mitford. Murray connects Gast’s positive view of the impact of migration on early Greece and his interest in the decline in the autonomy of Greek cities under Macedonian rule to his identity as a descendant of Huguenot refugees, speculating that he composed his History as an oblique warning about the superficial prosperity of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy.

Murray doesn’t take sides in the disputes he describes, but finds value in the Grecian history of the Radical George Grote, who sought to create a new image of Athenian democracy in the service of political reform, as well as in that of William Mitford, whose conservative faith in the unique advantages of the post-1688 English constitution underpinned his rejection of both Athens and Sparta as models for political futures. Murray concludes his chapter on Mitford with an extraordinary paragraph:

And as we enter the 21st century, which is surely destined to be seen historically as the Age of Oligarchy, as the 20th was that of (pseudo-)Democracy, maybe we should … pay more attention to oligarchy, and not just as the Iron Law of History … Whatever the official terminology, effective oligarchies may be based on a traditional aristocracy of birth and landholding, on the prerogatives of a founding elite (such as Greek colonies, Israel and Hispanic South America), on the power of wealth (in plutocracies such as the USA and Britain), on an intellectual elite (Plato’s Republic and modern France), on military power (Myanmar and Pakistan), on theocracy (the Islamic states and early Christian Europe), on tribal supremacy (modern Africa), on control of the media (Italy) or on systemically organised corruption (Sicily and Calabria, Colombia, Russia and the Ukraine) – and of course on a mixture of any or all of these elements. The stability of oligarchies and their ability to resist social change is one of their most important characteristics; and ultimately Mitford may well be right: of all the varied oligarchic forms of the consolidation of power, perhaps the most benign may be the ‘patrios politeia’, the ‘mixed constitution’ based on historical tradition, in the vision that unites Solon, Mitford and Polybius with Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers of the essentially undemocratic American constitution.

The provocative sweeping statement is one of Murray’s stylistic traits. He also endorses John Stuart Mill’s famous but facile comment that ‘the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings,’ and claims that ‘the Oxford society in which Momigliano lived from 1939 to 1947 … was the greatest gathering of the humanist scholarship of Europe since the Council of Florence in 1439.’ Perhaps inspired by the opening of Momigliano’s inaugural lecture at University College London, which he quotes twice (‘May I remind you that it is uncertain whether Greek history was invented in England or in Scotland?’), Murray also delights in assigning historical firsts: the word ‘inventor’ and its cognates occur 42 times. Jacob Burckhardt is said to offer ‘the first and best modern account of Greek culture’ and to have invented the concept, if not the terminology, of the Greek archaic age. Ernst Curtius, meanwhile, was ‘the first German to write a substantial Griechische Geschichte’, while Bulwer-Lytton’s Athens: Its Rise and Fall was both ‘the first serious radical history of Greece in modern Europe’ and ‘the most original English contribution to the continental movement that began the great age of history’. As the examples accumulate, it’s tempting to turn against Murray a point he makes when considering whether Burckhardt or Nietzsche was the first to understand the fundamentally competitive character of archaic Greek culture: ‘It is the use made of concepts within the thought-world of each individual that matters, not where he may have derived his ideas from.’

Of the many historians​ he discusses, aside from those he knew personally, Murray seems most in sympathy with Burckhardt, whose work he calls ‘the foundation of modern approaches to the Greek world’. Murray applauds Burckhardt’s move away from the practice of history as a recounting of facts and events towards a critical analysis of ‘the complex interplay of universal forces within a chronological frame’. He highlights the importance of Burckhardt’s focus on ‘culture’ as the realm of ‘what is revealed unconsciously through representation’, believing that it inaugurated a history that attends to the role of belief (including false belief), tradition and ritual in the composition and decomposition of social systems. When it comes to Burckhardt’s lectures on Greek cultural history, Murray admires his insights into Greek pessimism and the absence of eschatology from Greek religious thought:

For all the power of religion in the Greek world, Burckhardt’s Greeks were the first to understand what it is to be human in the modern sense, and to live in the present without hope for the future … In his account of Greek morals he revealed what is the basis of the difference between ourselves and the Greeks, and in his account of Greek pessimism he showed why the Greeks nevertheless express the fundamental predicament of humanity in Western culture.

Murray also seems to feel considerable personal sympathy with Burckhardt, whom he characterises as a ‘natural conservative’ who foresaw the coming of a destructive age of demagogues at the dawn of Germany’s Second Empire. He commends Burckhardt’s commitment to university teaching, noting his ‘distaste for the activities of his academic contemporaries, with their unreadable multiple volumes, their obsession with detail and facts, and the pompous arrogance of the viri eruditissimi in their professorial chairs’. (In the 1990s, Murray derided changes to Oxford’s promotion procedures that allowed academics to nominate themselves for university readerships and personal chairs. He was the only one of the Balliol triumvirate never to take a professorial title.) Burckhardt’s antipathy to nationalism is also congenial to Murray, who, despite painting a vivid picture of the excitement and energy of Romantic history in 19th-century Europe, sees its patriotic embrace of vernacular, national traditions and narratives as preparing the ground for the violent political and cultural fracturing of Europe in the 20th century. In 1914, James Murray refused to sign the ‘Writers’ Manifesto’ denouncing the German invasion of Belgium – a ‘source of family pride’ for Murray. One of the organisers was Gilbert Murray (no relation), the Glasgow and Oxford Hellenist and future chairman of the League of Nations Union. Oswyn interprets a terse letter from Gilbert to James as indicating that he understood James’s position that signing the manifesto could imperil international collaboration on the OED (other interpretations are possible).

As the narrative moves into his own lifetime, Murray begins to discuss scholars and institutions known to him directly. The story of the Warburg Institute serves as an introduction and synecdoche to the generation of European Jewish historians who arrived as refugees in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, and enriched anglophone approaches to the study of history. It is followed by chapters on Momigliano, Fernand Braudel, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. The final section, ‘Unfinished Business’, includes Murray’s own attempts, following his great-grandfather’s example, to bridge Cold War divides by maintaining cordial intellectual relations with historians on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

There are more personal reminiscences in these sections, though they are not absent from the first half of the book, where Murray treats readers to his glee at finding that Momigliano was unaware of John Gast, even though ‘there seemed no book in any library of the world whose existence was not recorded in duplicate in the little cash books that filled the pockets of his dark and shapeless suits,’ and muses on the object biographies of his book purchases: ‘Were these two separate broken sets’ of Bulwer-Lytton’s Athens ‘or the same far-flung set which had suffered separate journeys over 160 years to Oregon and Houston in railway trains, individually left on seats, forgotten at the houses of distant relatives, inherited and reinherited – only to be reunited by a mad English professor?’

Though sweeping in scope, Murray’s narrative is far from comprehensive: Nicole Loraux is a notable absence from his chapter on the ‘Paris School’, while Frances Yates, one of the most important historians associated with the Warburg Institute, is mentioned only in passing. The lopsidedness of his intellectual topography is also striking – which institutions he sees as meriting discussion, which get treated as centres of learning and which don’t. Oxford, Paris and the Warburg qualify, so – just about – does Cambridge, although Murray declares it a dead zone between the departure of Connop Thirlwall and Julius Hare in the 1830s and the arrival of Moses Finley in the mid-1950s: he is scathing about the interwar Cambridge Ancient History, while Jane Harrison is mentioned only as an unwise signatory to the Writers’ Manifesto.

A few pages after issuing his judgment on Cambridge, Murray writes: ‘In Oxford, the other English university’ – which completely elides the existence, by the 1830s, of several more English universities, and is especially perplexing given that the previous chapter discussed figures with close institutional links to UCL. Edinburgh doesn’t merit interrogation as a centre of learning either, although Murray at one point describes it as ‘the real intellectual capital of the British Isles’ and his endnotes contain many references to 19th-century periodicals and publishers based in the city.

It is at such moments that Murray’s Oxford-centric view reveals itself most clearly. Historians from outside those charmed halls do sometimes earn his regard, but tend to appear as isolated thinkers rather than as members of intellectual communities. The same is true of the international scene: he discusses Braudel’s institution-building at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, but Émile Durkheim and Louis Gernet are mentioned only as influences on Vernant. Chicago and Pisa, where Momigliano held long-term visiting professorships, feature merely as places to which he went to escape the ‘self-absorption’ of the All Souls common room.

If considered as a memoir, however, the book’s selectivity and partiality are intrinsic parts of its design and interest. By setting out so clearly his choices of who and what matters in ancient historiography, Murray is exercising both historical judgment and liberty of thought – the most important gift, as he sees it, of ancient political thought and practice to the modern world. He is also giving readers the story of the people and places that have mattered to him. The intellectual ancestors he lingers over are those who were formative for his own work, shaping his outlook as an internationalist who has combined a life committed to the serious study of the past with a conviction of the seriousness of human action in the present, the importance of historical consciousness in informing that action and the imperative of upholding cosmopolitan ideals of intellectual community even in unpropitious circumstances. This is part of the attraction for Murray of Braudel’s vision of ancient Greek history as part of world history. It helps to explain why he includes a vignette of Braudel composing the first draft of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and a photograph of Vernant, a commander in the French Resistance, in military fatigues at the 1944 liberation of Toulouse.

Murray offers up his own biography against the foil of his heroes. He traces the roots of his cosmopolitan convictions to his experience of military service: born in 1937 into the last generation of British men to be conscripted, Murray was about to be sent along with the rest of his artillery battery into combat in Egypt in 1956 when Eisenhower ordered Eden to withdraw. Suez, Murray says, ‘taught me the essential lesson that foreign policy is normally based on lies and misconceptions, and that politicians and generals are fools who do not understand the nature of the historical tragedies that they unleash.’ He arrived at Oxford having already abjured narrow patriotism and sworn private allegiance to the ‘ancient Republic of Letters’, vowing ‘to devote myself to ignoring the Iron Curtain that we were not supposed to penetrate’.

Murray’s sensitivity to the knavery of politicians and the tragedies they unleash sharpens the historical irony of his role in the ascent of the man who did so much to wreck British community with Europe. Boris Johnson read classics at Balliol in the 1980s under the tutelage of Murray and his colleagues. In 2018, around the beginning of Johnson’s premiership, the press reported that Murray had sent him an official renuntiatio amicitiae (renunciation of friendship) in Latin. Murray confirmed this publicly in 2022, glossing the ancient Roman practice as ‘the formal letter emperors send when they want someone to commit suicide or go into exile on the Black Sea’. This seems to me to say far more about Murray’s sense of self and the notion of Balliol as capital of the oikumene than it does about Johnson. Perhaps Murray was always too disillusioned with the world of affairs to share the sentiment expressed by Jowett in a letter to Florence Nightingale: ‘I should like to govern the world (would not you?) through my pupils, but I find it impossible & rather expect to do less & less.’

An atmosphere of exhaustion hangs over Murray’s final chapter, on ‘The Crisis of Theory in History’, in which he takes present-day historians to task for what he sees as a retreat from theory and collapse into relativism or an unthinking positivism that, as before Burckhardt, proceeds from a naive belief in facts as speaking for themselves. Against this, Murray endorses Frances Yates’s assertion (here she is at last) that:

History as it actually occurs is not quite the whole of history, for it leaves out of account the hopes that never materialised, the attempts to prevent the outbreak of wars, the futile efforts to solve differences by conciliatory methods. Hopes such as these are as much a part of history as the terrible events which falsify them, and in trying to assess the influence of their times upon idealists and lovers of peaceful activities such as our poets and academicians the hopes are perhaps as important as the events.

This understanding of history as encompassing the realm of belief, imagination, emotion and representation – in short, of culture – is what Murray presents as Burckhardt’s achievement. It has guided his own historical work on ancient Greek poleis as ‘cities of reason’ and on the cultural practices of the symposium. It also orients this collection of essays on the modern historiography of ancient Greece, despite his inability to peer beyond the dead end into which he thinks ‘the Western tradition of ancient history’ has wandered. One danger of the tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority is its tendency to bring about narrowness of vision, because overconfidence in its own vantage point bars the way to appreciating the enlightenment offered by others. What makes Murray’s historiographic essays so rich is that this is only half the story.