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Oswyn Murray, "The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present" (Harvard UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Oswin Murray
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- [00:30]
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- [01:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:07]
Gregory McNiff
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gregory McNiff and I'm excited to be joined by Osalyn Murray, the author of the Muse of History, the Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present. The book was published by Belkhnap Press, an imprint of Harvard University press in the US in September of 2024. Oswin 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 symposium Drinking Greek Style, and is the co editor of the Oxford History of the Classical World. I selected the Muse of History because it explores our relationship with the past and how we view ourselves in the present, particularly those living in Western democracies. I should add that not only is it a work of great scholarship, but it is a beautifully produced book, cover to cover with wonderful the pages themselves gorgeous pictures and it's truly a book you will want to own and treasure. This is not a book you want to download on Kindle, but you want to go out and purchase. It's wonderful just to hold in your hands. That was a fantastic experience reading it. Hello Oswin, thank you for joining me today to discuss your book. Hello Oswin. Why did you write the museum history and who is the target reader?
- [03:23]
Oswin Murray
Oh yes, that's a great, very difficult question. There's no one reason. What interested me was the question what is history? Or what do historians think history is? Why do we do it? Having spent 50 years as a historian, I was still puzzled by this question. To study why historians study history, which is a sort of metaphysical question. I think what we need to do is to study how they have approached a particular period or civilization over several centuries. Perhaps now there are very few continuous themes in history and one might perhaps take the American Revolution. What have historians said about the American Revolution over a long period of time? Or the American Civil War is another obvious question. Or the French Revolution or the English Civil War. All these topics have been written about over several centuries and they will perhaps tell us how historians approach their problems and what are their presuppositions. But the most interesting one to me, because I was a Greek historian, is Greek history, which has been continuously studied at least for the last 300 years. And so I thought that by taking historians in the different last centuries, I would see how historians actually what actually made them work. That's one reason. Another reason is of course rather banal. It was for me an end of life experience. It was my desire to communicate what wisdom I had. It was not a textbook at all, but an invitation to my readers to think about it, about the practice of history. And then a third reason or third aspect of the book which I was very interested in, was it is of course a very ironical book. It's written against my own training. It's not the sort of history that an ordinary empirical English historian should write. I wanted to see what would happen if I thought about the people who had influenced me to stop being a straightforward historian, be a complex historian interested in new problems. Well, I wanted to start with a poem, just as the book ends with a poem, because I think poetry is where the truth is most easily discovered. There was this poem by my friend Ruth Padel called the Muse of History, and it was about Vermeer's painting. And the more I looked at that painting, the more interesting I saw it to be. Because what it does, the painting is often called the muse of painting by the experts, but it is in fact the muse of History. It is a picture of the Muse of History, which is why the book is called the Muse of History. Cleo, the Muse of History was a one of the nine muses. And the individual being painted in the picture is someone dressed up as the Muse of History in costume. And she holds all the appropriate elements for being historical. And as you say, on the wall, there is another image that is the image of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, although at the time Vermeer painted them, they weren't united because they'd been split into Catholic and Protestant. And then on the right hand side of the painting, there is the artist, seen from the back painting the picture. That is the picture that we see. So there are three separate dimensions in the idea. One is that there is the viewer or the paint. Well, there's four really, because there's the painter, the viewer of the painting, the painter and what he's painting and the meaning of the painting, all bound together in this single picture, which is not in fact a uniform picture, because as David Hockney has recently shown, it's got a series of different perspectives. Each part of the picture is painted through a camera obscura. And these cameras give you a slightly different perspective. So there's an incoherence in the picture. It sort of shimmers with meaning and you're not quite sure where you are. And that seemed to me. It seemed to me to be symbolic of what I was trying to do. I wasn't sure where I was, who was I and who Are you reading this book? That's the essential argument of the book. As Croce said, all history is contemporary history. It reflects what we think is important in the past. Unlike Alice in Through the Looking Glass, we look into a mirror and what we see is ourselves. She could look through the mirror into an Alternative universe. And that's what we're trying to do, but unfortunately, we can't do it. We can't step into the past. So we do our best to try. And if you like, distort the mirror to make it look as if we are in the past. It's the essential problem of the historian.
- [10:48]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. I mean, I do want to talk about that. As you move through each generation and each culture, how their view of Greeks and their own government changes. And I should say you write as well in this same section about the overall aim of the book being to raise the questions of the relativity of historical narrative and its relation to the possibility of a theory of human society. Could you expand on what you mean by that? A theory of human society?
- [11:16]
Oswin Murray
Well, I think most of us have had the rather naive belief that history teaches us lessons. It tells us how society actually works. And there is a sense in which that is true. But the trouble is that the questions we ask it are the questions that preoccupy us now, not the questions that preoccupied them in the past. And so when we try and construct a theory of history, we're always even more imprisoned in the present than we are when we try and describe the past.
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Gregory McNiff
Touching on this theme of the past, what is the enduring fascination with the Greek culture, particularly for Western societies?
- [12:13]
Oswin Murray
I think obsession with the Greeks really began, started in the Renaissance, but even then the Romans were much more important. It wasn't until the Enlightenment, until the beginning of the 18th century, that the Greeks began to seem to be models for or to embody modern problems of historical change. If you ask questions about theories of government or aristocracy versus democracy and so on, or the place of religion in society, these seem to be mirrored or to be prefigured in the ancient Greeks much more than in the Romans. And also at the same time, the. In literature, people became obsessed with Greek literature. So Roman literature began to fade away, although that had been the basis of everybody's education. People spoke and read Latin much more easily than they did Greek. But they began to realize that Homer and Aeschylus and Plato were far greater historians than had ever existed at any other period, far greater writers than had ever existed in any other period. So it was this realization that the Greeks were superior to us in literature, in art, in, and perhaps in historical thought that fueled the turning away from Roman models to Greek models.
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Gregory McNiff
I'm sorry.
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Oswin Murray
Yeah. To see what we could learn from them. Yeah.
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Gregory McNiff
That is fascinating because you do at one point touch upon this notion that there are no transcendental Values, for example, like liberty and democracy. But at the same time, as you just said, we recognize the, I hate to say the superiority, but the, the wonderful culture that the Greeks produced relative to the Romans. And I realized this is a whole PhD thesis or sections of. But so I do want to jump into again the details of your thesis and looking at the development of historiography of the Greeks through each age and culture. And one thing I found fascinating was the contrast of the dichotomy between Athens and Sparta, and particularly that the Scottish and French Enlightenment thinkers were much more favorably disposed to Sparta, while the English thinkers of that period, the English historians, almost seemed indifferent to that, to that debate. Could you talk a little bit about that? Why Nami, French, Scottish thinkers were I guess, more favorably disposed to Sparta, or they viewed it as a better system of government?
- [15:23]
Oswin Murray
Well, I think there are probably two reasons. One is contemporary views that democracy, Athenian democracy, was a rather bad idea. It was much better to have something approaching aristocracy, to have a hierarchy and to have a disciplined body of citizens. That was presented much more vividly by Sparta. Sparta was the society which sacrificed, was very egalitarian, but sacrificed innovation to military discipline. So that's one reason why Sparta seemed to be more attractive. I think the other was really simply that if you read the ancient sources, if you read the works of Thucydides and Plato and so on, they admired Sparta. And so you began by admiring Sparta and it was only later that you realized that there was an alternative way of looking at the Greek world.
- [16:47]
Gregory McNiff
One of the enjoyments of reading this book is the individuals that you bring to life and offer background and context and discuss their approach. And I think the most fascinating individual is the 18th century Irish historian John Gastronomy, who unfortunately does not seem to have the place in history today that you would think he might, given his approach and his understanding of the Greek culture. Could you talk a little bit about him and maybe how you would compare him to other historians, for example, Edward Gibbon?
- [17:21]
Oswin Murray
Yes, well, I love the unsuccessful and the forgotten. And I had personally been responsible for the rediscovery of John Gast. So he was certainly going to feature in my book, for purely selfish reasons, as being a new discovery. But he's also the first critical Greek historian, a generation before anyone else, actually managed to write a Greek history, which makes him quite important, even if he is now forgotten. And what's more, he exemplified so many of the themes that I wanted to come out of the book. First of all, the fact that he was essentially an outsider in Fact, a refugee from Catholic France. His father came across to England as a result of the Edict of Nantes, the persecution of the Protestants in France. And he ended up in Ireland because the British, the English, were trying to Protestantize Irish culture. And he was bilingual in French and English. And then quite later on, in my researches on him, I discovered that he had, in fact, been a close relative of the Baron de Montesquieu, who is really the founder of the Enlightenment. And the idea of philosophy being incorporated into history through the legacy of Montesquieu was to me, absolutely fascinating.
- [19:23]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, you write about Gast that, quote, his independence of judgment and narrative skill are superior to any other Greek history of the period. What made him such a great historian relative to his contemporaries?
- [19:38]
Oswin Murray
I think it was really the legacy of Montesquieu. His book is rather peculiar because it was initially a dialogue in which there were three participants. Somebody who knew nothing about Greek history, somebody who knew all the orthodox stuff, and an expert who put them both right in different ways, told the things, really meant, for instance, that the Trojan War was not a romantic fiction, but a trade war. Now, many of these things we don't believe any longer. But he was looking at it from a rational point of view, and that was extremely interesting and far in advance of people at the time. In fact, of course, there was no Greek historian effectively earlier than him. He just represented something that seemed to me characteristic of the meaning of Greek history.
- [20:47]
Gregory McNiff
Prior to you rediscovering him and bringing him back to the forefront of scholarship. Why do you think he fell out of favor after his death?
- [20:57]
Oswin Murray
He was probably the most unsuccessful author that has ever been. He would never finish anything. He kept making promises and then not performing the wonderful correspondence between him and John Murray, where John Murray is trying to get him to finish the book, and he fails to do so. It's extraordinary. And it ended up as a wrapping for fish in the market in London.
- [21:40]
Gregory McNiff
And you own. I'm not sure if it's a first edition, but you own what you think might be an edition published relatively soon after his death.
- [21:50]
Oswin Murray
I own the first complete edition. Yes. Which was created out of the remains that he left behind. I also own the first edition of the first part of the book, which I found on the Web, which had belonged to the uncle of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin.
- [22:13]
Gregory McNiff
Wow.
- [22:16]
Oswin Murray
So searching on the web is a very good way to do research, I think.
- [22:22]
Gregory McNiff
Oh.
- [22:22]
Oswin Murray
You come across things that you would never expect to find.
- [22:26]
Gregory McNiff
That's an interesting comment, because I do want to ask you about the Republic of letters later on in the book. And maybe you could argue the Internet may actually contribute to it or advance it in some way. But before we get there, obviously John Gaslit is an obscure figure. You touch on figures that we are much more familiar with, not the least of which is Jon Stewart and Mill, who wrote or regarded Marathon as the most important battle in English history. Why did he think that?
- [22:55]
Oswin Murray
Well, because, as he says otherwise, if the Athenians had lost the battle of Marathon, the Britons and the Saxons might still be wandering in the woods. If you imagine that the Persians had won the battle of Marathon as opposed to the Athenians, the whole of Western history as we conceive it would be completely different.
- [23:29]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, it's an interesting chapter on how you talk about the English looking back at Greece to fashion or view their own culture and present or their own culture at that time. I want to move a little forward. One thing I found really fascinating is your discussion of the 19th century. And you write about the age of history, cease to be a series of moral examples and transition to a science of progress. And I think that may have mirrored what's going on in the larger culture with the scientific revolution. Can you expand on this assessment on how the approach or the methodology and goal of history changed during this period? And maybe you could touch on either the French Revolution or Darwin to the extent it contributed to this shift.
- [24:15]
Oswin Murray
Yes. Well, I think each period of human existence, each historical period, tends to deify, to regard as the essential aspect a different sort of discipline. And just as we in the 20th century have turned the master disciplines of anthropology and sociology into things that explain the whole of human thought, so in the 18th century, it was philosophy. In the 18th century, people believed that essentially human beings are all the same and they were all rational. And it was for the philosophers to determine the rules by which human society existed. But in the 19th century, that no longer seemed to be a viable proposition. First of all, the French Revolution had completely destroyed all the assumptions of the 18th century. So at that point, history becomes much more important for understanding human society than philosophy. And people turned to history in order to explain not the identities of all societies, but the differences between them. So that the nation state was founded on the idea that every single tribe in Western world was a different tribe which was opposed to all the other tribes. And they were all destined to fight each other, as they did indeed in the First World War and in several wars before that, so that history was the dominant discipline. You must find out the exact nature of your tribal past in order to Construct a nation state. And this was intensified, I think, or at least chimed in with the new scientific revolution, in which Darwin showed that the explanation of everything was the distant past. We were monkeys once. Evolution produced the society that we have, the people that we are now, and therefore evolution produces society that we have now. And so the idea of evolution was incredibly important in constructing a way of looking at the past. And at the same time, it told you about the future. Because it was a necessary belief of this theory of evolution that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And the next animal that evolved evolved through the extermination of the previous animal. And so that society was what the history of society was, one continuous history of progress towards a better, more perfect end. Society, which would probably never end, it would probably continue until finally, and nobody ever actually reached this conclusion, but until finally, we might end up with a society of ants, because you would abolish all the things that were irrelevant to the activities that were the most important.
- [28:14]
Gregory McNiff
In society in keeping with this evolution quote, unquote. There was a shift in admiration from Sparta rule to Athenian democracy that we touched on earlier. And you snite a number of historians forward, lightened Paine, depauw, Grote. Could you talk about what was the catalyst for this shift and maybe Grote's contribution in driving a better appreciation for Athenian democracy?
- [28:44]
Oswin Murray
Oh, yes, yes. I mean, during the revolutionary period, there were, of course, lots of people speculating about the past. And what they saw was that the things that they wanted for their society now were indeed best exemplified in Athens. So Athens became the model for all forms of revolutionary society. Instead of utopias, people investigated Athens from a historical point of view. And that indeed, is why we still continue to regard Athens as. As the most interesting part of Greek history, rightly or wrongly. But that is the point at which Greek history turned into the history of freedom, the history of democracy, the history of liberty, free thinking, everything that you wanted in your own society. And they were right. Athens was a much freer society than most ancient societies. So the fascination was a perfectly genuine response to the experience. But that led, of course, to trying to discover within Athenian institutions and habits, the models for the future of the world. And one of these was democracy. And Grote, well, I think one's got to remember is the most successful theory of history that has ever existed is utilitarianism. They believed that you could actually interpret the whole of human society through utilitarian philosophical principles. And so Grote turned his ancient Greeks into perfect model, utilitarians who practiced democracy of the best sort, such as we must immediately establish in Britain and everywhere else.
- [31:09]
Gregory McNiff
I found one interesting aspect of your discussion with Grote, that he favored Cleisthenes over Solon as the founder of democracy. And you spend a fair amount of time on that. Could you touch on why he might have gone in that direction?
- [31:23]
Oswin Murray
Well, I spend a fair amount of time on it because he was actually right. That's one of the great discoveries of the 19th century. Everyone before that had followed the ancient sources and regarded Solon as the founder of Athenian democracy. Well, that's, as we think we now know, and has been proved by archaeological investigations of varied sorts, is completely false. It was Cleisthenes long after Solon and before Pericles, who created the machinery of Athenian democracy. But Groke came to that view, for which there was very little evidence at the time, by studying the problems that existed after the Great reform bill of 1832, when they discovered that changing the nature of electing people to parliament did not actually break the power of the conservative working classes. So they. Conservative, not working classes. It's probably wrong to say that, but of the fundamental conservative view of human society. And so Grote came to the conclusion that this was because the elections were open elections. That's to say, those who voted, voted in public and announced who they were voting for, and therefore they didn't dare vote against their masters. And so they voted conservative when they should have voted, according to Grote, radical or liberal. And reflecting on this, he saw that Cleisthenes had invented an incredibly complicated system which actually destroyed the power of the aristocracy. And he was fascinated by this and wrote it up in detail. No one believed him for about 50 years afterwards. No one thought that this was a viable proposition until archaeologists in the late 20th century discovered that it was actually true.
- [33:51]
Gregory McNiff
Moving on to another name I think we recognize is Jacob Burkhart. Could you talk briefly about his approach to history and the idea of the three great powers relative to Hegel's approach and Burkhart's influence on Nietzsche?
- [34:08]
Oswin Murray
Yeah, Well, I think Hegel had sought to tie the development of history to his theory of philosophy. And he'd written a series of. He'd given a series of lectures showing how or in issue history reflected the development of liberty from east to west, ending up in Berlin with him as the most free person in the human world and therefore able to plot the development through the various civilizations. And Bocaert saw that this was complete rubbish, and he still believed that there must be some set of fundamental structures by which history was determined. And he evolved this idea of three great powers. The state, the organization of the state, religion and culture. And culture he defined as all that is spontaneously arisen, the realm of the free, not necessarily universal, that cannot lay claim to universal authority. And then he investigated a series of civilizations. In fact, he was planning to write the whole history of Europe from this point of view, though he never finished it, as an interplay between these three forces, the state, religion and culture. The state determining religion and culture, religion determining the shape of the state, and culture and culture determining the state and religion. So you had a series of possibilities, all of which produced a variety of different Western forms of civilization to him. He came at the end of his life. He wrote a book, a series of lectures on the Greeks. The Greeks exemplified a society in which culture and the state determined religion. And the state was a very, very totalitarian state. In his view, even democracy was a sort of totalitarian democracy which didn't allow the individual freedom. But there was also culture. And these two conflicted with each other. And so he produced a way of looking at history which he termed, or. No, not, well, I think it was termed at the time, Kulturgesichte, the history of cultures in which we weren't interested at all in the events or their causes. What we were interested in was the interplay between these various forces. And at the time, and indeed to me still to a very large extent, that explains the past much more interestingly than concentrating on events. And he was a professor at the University of. Of Basel, and his influence on Nietzsche came about. He'd been appointed professor at Basel of history in 1844. Nietzsche arrived, age 24, in 1869, when Burkhard was already 50, and they became close friends until really the whole time that they were together in Basel, because they were the two people who saw more, or thought they saw more clearly the meaning of history than anyone else. Unfortunately, in 1889, Nietzsche had to be incarcerated into lunatic asylum and they ceased to communicate with each other. But what was very interesting, and this is what I was, what I really was fascinated by, the ideas of Nietzsche are very important in modern historical thought. But there was a basic conflict between Burckhardt's view of history and Nietzsche's. And Nietzsche saw this in his short book on the use and abuse of history for life. Nietzsche pinpointed what was the difference. Burckhardt was a dilettante. He just wanted to sit and contemplate different periods of the past. Nietzsche wanted to use history to change the future. And so Burckhardt became the enemy. And I think part of the problem being Nietzsche's insanity relates to this conflict that he saw between his master, Jakob Burckhardt, who he admired so much, and his own belief that Burkhardt was completely wrong and was indeed the main enemy against which he was trying to establish a new form of history.
- [39:50]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, like you said, that is fascinating. And in the end of the book, you discuss why do we write history? And you touch on that theme, particularly of understanding the present and hopefully influencing the present. And I want to ask your thoughts on that, but I do want to move on to what I think is probably the most interesting chapter, which is Socrates, and how you acknowledge the lack of credible sources and factual understanding of Socrates's origin. And yet right at the same time, quote, he is the first and only Greek about whom it is possible to write a biography. How do you reconcile this problem for historians regarding Solomon?
- [40:33]
Oswin Murray
I think from the point of view of the historian, the problem really is not the lack of credible sources, but the fact that all the sources are credible and they all tell different stories. So who is Socrates? Is the real question, is he the Socrates of Plato? Is he the Socrates of Aristophanes, or is he the Socrates of Xenophon? And this was a struggle that people were engaged in the 19th century to try and understand what Socrates was actually like and what was his thought. Because Socrates was known as the supreme ironist, who never told you what to think, but only questioned your beliefs. And each person who wrote about Socrates, most of them philosophers, wrote about him in order to fit him into their system. And so we have a series of different portraits of Socrates. And there was a wonderful book by a woman called. There's Sarah Kaufman, who unfortunately committed suicide, but it's called in French, Socrate, in the plural Socrateses. And her view is that there is this. Socrates is a figure that changes all the time. And I think that's what I mean according to who is looking at him. That's what I mean by saying that he's the only one about whom one could write a biography. I don't think anyone has actually managed to write a plausible biography of Socrates, partly because he's captured by every different philosophical school who wants to make him into their hero, and partly because.
- [42:43]
Gregory McNiff
It'S.
- [42:44]
Oswin Murray
Not clear who one should believe. It's as if Socrates himself wanted to disappear from history, so he left contradictory impressions of what he was like that was his supreme. Remember, there's a much later philosopher Plotinus wanted a mystical philosopher, wanted to disappear from philosophy. He wouldn't let anyone make his portrait or sculpt him or write his life. He wanted not to be there, but just the thoughts to be there. And I think Socrates didn't have a set of thoughts. He wanted to leave you puzzled. But that is the closest you can get to a biography or an autobiography in antiquity, before St. Augustine, who, of course, wrote his confessions in order to explain exactly to you all the mistakes and the wrong turnings that he'd made in his life. And that is the first true autobiography.
- [43:59]
Gregory McNiff
You also touch on the theme of the Republic of Letters and how important that is for advancing and protecting scholarship. Could you talk a little bit about that, its origin, and how we can protect it today?
- [44:11]
Oswin Murray
Yes. Well, the concept of the Republic of Letters was, I think, essentially formulated in the wars of religion, when Europe was divided between Protestantism of various sorts and the Catholic religion. And he was supposed to belong to these. And scholars of antiquity believed that what they were finding out about the past was more true or more important than these conflicts of religion. And so they deliberately set up a network of letter writing between the various parts of Europe in which they continued to talk about their own interests, their own scholarship, without paying any attention whatsoever to political or religious matters. And that notion that as a separate republic, which is greater and more important than belonging to a particular religion, belonging to a particular state, so you become a citizen of the world, a citizen of the Republic of Letters, and you know what the values are, and they are not the values of the political system to which you belong. And that's what I've been taught to believe in, partly as a result of the refugee crisis in the late 30s and 40s, partly as a result of the Cold War. To me, it doesn't matter whether anyone.
- [46:09]
Gregory McNiff
Is.
- [46:11]
Oswin Murray
A person with whom one's. One's collaborating is Communist, Marxist, Chinese, German, French or whatever. One of the things that's given me the greatest pleasure, actually, in what has happened since the publication of this book is that the first translations that are coming out now of the book are into Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Samizdat. Russian, yeah.
- [46:45]
Gregory McNiff
That almost plays into your thesis.
- [46:47]
Oswin Murray
Yes, yes. I mean, I haven't got a German or a French or an Italian translation. They may come, but I don't, because, you know, to them it's not really relevant. But the underlying sort of message of my book is that scholarship of whatever sort, is more important than any political argument.
- [47:17]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, no, it absolutely comes across, and this is a great segue into an individual figure so prominently in your book and I think in your career, Arnaldo Mamiliano. Forgive me if I'm not pronouncing his name properly, but he's clearly one of the greatest historians of the 20th century. Could you talk about his influence on history and your own career? Yes, and your own? Yeah. Thank you.
- [47:48]
Oswin Murray
I first met Mogliano when I was trying to write a PhD in Oxford, and no one in Oxford was. They all said they were incompetent to deal with that subject, but they said, I know one person who could do it, that is Arnaldo Mamigliano. So, quite unusually, I was sent to Emiliano, who was a professor in London, not in Oxford. And that sort of procedure of transferring PhD students was very unusual. And the first thing that happened was a letter from Emiliano in which he said, you will know that I didn't know that I was responsible for the rejection of your article to the Journal of Roman Studies. One does not write learned articles on subjects suitable for student essays. And I. I sat back and I thought, I'm never again going to write an article suitable for students. I'm going to write articles about more important things. And I thought, here is a man who really understands what is important in history. And so I became his disciple. And he had lots of enemies. It caused me some disruption in my academic career, but that didn't matter because he was, first of all the most learned man that I knew in Europe or Americas. He had a way of looking at history, which I've just written, in fact, as a coder, perhaps to my first letter from him, I can say I've written an article trying to explain what is the secret of Mamigliano's enormous influence. He ranged across not only the whole of ancient history, but the whole of European history. He saw the continuity between the ancient world and the modern world in ways that it's not that we didn't see it, but we were not competent to understand it. He knew so much. He inhabited these completely shapeless blue suits with enormous pockets. And in those pockets there were cash books, into which, whenever he was told about a new book or found a new book, he would write a reference. It's described in one of Iris Murdoch's novels. She talks about a historian who works like this. And the cash books would be sort of have two. They would stay as books, and you could tear out the page behind and stick it in a card index. And so he became so learned that you could not. I mean, I remember every Time I sent him a chapter of my thesis. He would comment on it with great rapidity and an enormous amount of knowledge. And yet only about 10 years later would I discover that he had in fact already written an article on this subject. So I was never the first to say the things that. But he saw what I'd said and he compared it, what he'd said. And he knew what the arguments for and against the various opinions, positions were. But when he first came to England, he came obviously from a fascist state which had appointed him in 1936 to the professorship of Turin, against, although he was a Jew, and against the opposition of fascist members of members of the party. He was appointed. And he came with these two ideas about the relationship between peace and liberty in the ancient world. And to him it seemed that the idea of liberty had been invented by the Greeks, but they were unable to connect it to the idea of peace because they were always quarreling with each other. The Romans inherited the idea of liberty, but they lost it in conquering the world. And they established a peace, which was a political peace in which everybody was ruled by the Roman Emperor. So they had peace, a sort of peace, but no liberty. And the two concepts of peace and liberty were first united by the Christians. Now that for a person brought up as an Orthodox Jew, was an extraordinary statement. But the peace of God which passeth all understanding is the ultimate liberty.
- [53:29]
Gregory McNiff
I would just add, you quote, I think, a correspondence between Mamiliano and Desantis about Christianity and Judaism. And it's just fascinating a the respect for the. They had for each other and how they viewed those two traditions as a very powerful, I would say, force for good or in shaping culture. And to your point, they somehow managed to see the power of each culture and they sort of stood outside it. And I think even they suggest it isn't so much organized religion, but the notions of the sanctity of life and useful function, et cetera. They see it as a driving force. Force. It was a fascinating read. Just the correspondence.
- [54:13]
Oswin Murray
That is an absolutely fascinating period. And to think that Desantis was an old blind professor who had refused to sign the Fascist oath and therefore been dismissed from his post as professor at Rome University. And the young 20 year old Milianu could write letters like that to each other saying, you know, I am more Christian than you, you are more Jewish than I am, or the now an extraordinary thing. And he gave this set of lectures in 1940 in Cambridge, in the middle of the. It was a phoney war when almost immediately Afterwards, Mussolini declared war against Britain, and so Mamigliano was incarcerated as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. But before that, he'd written this wonderful series of six lectures in which he expounded this theory. And that was his wartime view of the world. But after the war, he abandoned it. That book, which was discovered after his death as a set of six fully articulated in English lectures from 1940, was discovered in an attic and was printed, therefore, for the first time several many years after his death, he had abandoned it. And he'd suddenly taken up this idea that you must study historians across the ages. Which is, in a way, why my book, the Muse of History is a. Is homage to him, because that's how I was taught to view history, that it's the historians who are as important as the actors, because the historians determine what survives.
- [56:32]
Gregory McNiff
Oh, that's a wonderful explanation of the book. And, yeah, he sounds like an absolutely just towering figure. And such a wonderful job of bringing him to life. I want to close with the last chapter of the book, which Mary Beard, in her review of the tls, calls a masterclass and required reading for anyone. What history is. And I don't think anyone needs an explanation for who Mary Beard is. So could you talk about why we write history?
- [57:04]
Oswin Murray
Yes, that to me, is the ultimate puzzle. But I can see that there are a number of different reasons why people write history. And all of them, I think, are, in their way, valid. We write history in order to discover the truth about the past. We think we can find out something that other people have missed or understand it better. We write history in order to understand the present, because we are in the present. And we therefore have certain views which enable us to understand aspects of the past that have not been understood before. We write history to influence the present as sort of propaganda. But then there are more, might call more spiritual aspects to the writing of history. We write history in order to live in the past. We want to know what it was like to be someone in the past generation. And one of the advantages of that is by so doing we can protect ourselves from the present, from the persecutions and perversions of modern culture, by manipulators of the truth, by persecutors, tyrants and demagogues. It's a form of defense. And we also write history, I may say, to protect ourselves from the future. Because, as I say, my last anecdote in the book, the lesson of history is possibly that things can only get worse. That's history, said the bus driver to the drunkard how do you know what's true? And he replied, that's history. Things only get worse. It always does. That's history.
- [59:08]
Gregory McNiff
And that's absolutely a fantastic way to end Oswin. But I would note you do suggest each generation has to carve its own path and that there's some relationship between knowledge and suffering. So while it may get worse, can we still benefit from that?
- [59:27]
Oswin Murray
Yes, of course we can. Something, somewhere will survive and that new life will need the past to reconstruct, to reinvent itself.
- [59:44]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I think that's a great way to end it. And your book does such a wonderful job of connecting and reconnecting us with the past. I wish I had had this book when I was an undergrad studying. I'm not sure I would have understand it remotely as well as you've explained it today, but absolutely fantastic book. Again, the Muse of History, the Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present. Oslin, thank you so much for your time and writing. Such a thought provoking and enjoyable book.
- [60:16]
Oswin Murray
It's been a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. Thank you.