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

How the modern world understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter today. "This majestic book by Oswyn Murray has been long and eagerly awaited...and its quality and scope exceed expectations." —Edith Hall, BBC History Magazine 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 draws...