Katherine Harloe
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/katherine-harloe/the-last-generation
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| Vol. 46 No. 19 · 10 October 2024 |
Em um ensaio sobre a "necrofilia" acadêmica, publicado em 2021, a historiadora da ciência Lorraine Daston observou que escrever histórias de suas próprias disciplinas é frequentemente uma desculpa para os acadêmicos comungarem com fantasmas. Não apenas quaisquer fantasmas, mas seus antepassados acadêmicos. Daston conecta esse anseio aos intensos laços forjados por instituições tradicionais de educação humanística. Lugares como a universitas magistrorum et scholarium medieval, a escola pública inglesa moderna ou o seminário de pesquisa alemão do século XIX geraram profundas lealdades. A devoção à comunidade acadêmica frequentemente igualou ou até mesmo suplantou os laços familiares, levando os acadêmicos a "imaginar suas próprias histórias como genealogias ersatz, nas quais os laços de mestre e discípulo substituem os de parentes e a filiação de ideias reconstitui as biografias dos pensadores". Esta é a razão, argumenta Daston, "apesar dos esforços repetidos tanto na erudição quanto na ciência desde o início do século XIX para separar a vida e as obras, todas as disciplinas reconstroem suas próprias histórias como linhagens e linhas de vida".
Os clássicos, como Daston aponta, fizeram isso com particular fervor, e em nenhum lugar mais do que em Oxford. Quando Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor de Grego de 1960 a 1989, publicou uma coleção de ensaios sobre a história de sua disciplina, ele a chamou de Blood for the Ghosts, referindo-se não apenas à cena necromântica na Odisseia de Homero, mas também a um discurso célebre sobre a escrita histórica grega proferido por Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, o mais famoso classicista alemão de sua geração, em uma visita a Oxford em 1908. Agora, Oswyn Murray, que se aposentou há vinte anos após uma longa carreira ensinando história antiga em Oxford, produziu uma coleção de ensaios historiográficos também dedicados dis manibus, aos espíritos dos que partiram.
Murray, que fez 87 anos este ano, é o último sobrevivente de um triunvirato de acadêmicos que dirigiu o ensino de clássicos no Balliol College durante as últimas décadas do século XX. Seu mandato como bolsista tutorial em história antiga, que se estendeu de 1968 a 2004, foi superado pelo de seu colega Jasper Griffin, que se tornou bolsista em 1961, tendo também sido aluno de graduação em Balliol (seu colega mais jovem Oliver Lyne, que chegou a Balliol em 1971, morreu inesperadamente no cargo em 2005). Em um artigo publicado no boletim informativo de ex-alunos de Balliol em 2004 para marcar sua aposentadoria e a de Griffin, Murray escreveu: "Somos a última geração de classicistas automáticos, vindos de uma era em que uma proporção relativamente alta de meninos e meninas mais brilhantes foi canalizada para as formas do Classical VI e para Oxford e Cambridge."
Para entender este livro, é preciso ter alguma noção do peso simbólico dos "clássicos Balliol" para a geração de Murray. Uma das faculdades mais antigas de Oxford, no século XIX, a Balliol se transformou, por meio de uma combinação de sólida gestão financeira e exames de bolsa abertos, de uma instituição em dificuldades com números decrescentes de alunos na faculdade acadêmica preeminente da universidade. Sob uma série de mestres progressistas, incluindo Benjamin Jowett, a Balliol adotou aspectos da nova cultura de profissionalismo, relativamente meritocrática e não denominacional, que estava remodelando as elites britânicas vitorianas, e encorajou muitos de seus melhores alunos a fazer exames públicos nas recém-estabelecidas Escolas de Honra. Isso significava que os graduados da faculdade estavam bem posicionados para fazer os exames abertos de serviço público, que foram introduzidos na segunda metade do século e ponderados em favor do conhecimento e das capacidades inculcadas pelo curso de clássicos de Oxford, conhecido formalmente como Literae Humaniores e popularmente como "Greats". Na década de 1850, Jowett fez lobby com políticos para que Oxford garantisse "uma participação nas nomeações indianas"; no final de sua vida, em 1893, seu desejo estava perto de ser realizado. Como W.H. Walsh observa na História da Universidade de Oxford, "no período de 1892 a 1914, quase metade dos ingressantes no Serviço Civil Imperial eram graduados em Oxford, com a consequência de que, em 1938, seis dos oito governadores provinciais da Índia eram Grandes Homens que haviam se formado entre 1897 e 1910". Balliol também produziu uma série de políticos, incluindo Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins e Edward Heath.
Tomando como epígrafe a máxima de Benedetto Croce de que "toda história é história contemporânea", Murray propõe que a historiografia da Europa Ocidental sobre a Grécia e Roma antigas desde o século XVIII gira em torno de dois conceitos, "imperialismo" e "liberdade". A história antiga, ele argumenta, era um modo de reflexão sobre problemas sociais e políticos contemporâneos: o declínio dos modelos monárquicos de governo, o crescimento do poder ultramarino e os desafios da administração imperial, e o avanço das ideias e movimentos políticos liberais e democráticos. Para ilustrar a maneira como isso se desenrolou na prática, ele analisa os paradigmas concorrentes da Atenas e Esparta antigas no pensamento político europeu do século XVIII, o filelenismo romântico e as histórias gregas de homens de letras politicamente ativos, como William Mitford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, John Stuart Mill e George Grote.
A declaração provocativa e abrangente é um dos traços estilísticos de Murray. Ele também endossa o famoso, mas fácil comentário de John Stuart Mill de que "a batalha de Maratona, mesmo como um evento na história inglesa, é mais importante do que a batalha de Hastings", e afirma que "a sociedade de Oxford na qual Momigliano viveu de 1939 a 1947 ... foi a maior reunião da erudição humanista da Europa desde o Concílio de Florença em 1439". Talvez inspirado pela abertura da palestra inaugural de Momigliano no University College London, que ele cita duas vezes ("Posso lembrá-lo de que é incerto se a história grega foi inventada na Inglaterra ou na Escócia?"), Murray também se delicia em atribuir estreias históricas: a palavra "inventor" e seus cognatos ocorrem 42 vezes. Diz-se que Jacob Burckhardt oferece "o primeiro e melhor relato moderno da cultura grega" e inventou o conceito, se não a terminologia, da era arcaica grega. Ernst Curtius, enquanto isso, foi ‘o primeiro alemão a escrever uma substancial Griechische Geschichte’, enquanto Athens: Its Rise and Fall de Bulwer-Lytton foi tanto ‘a primeira história radical séria da Grécia na Europa moderna’ quanto ‘a mais original contribuição inglesa ao movimento continental que começou a grande era da história’. À medida que os exemplos se acumulam, é tentador se voltar contra Murray, um ponto que ele levanta ao considerar se Burckhardt ou Nietzsche foi o primeiro a entender o caráter fundamentalmente competitivo da cultura grega arcaica: ‘É o uso feito de conceitos dentro do mundo do pensamento de cada indivíduo que importa, não de onde ele pode ter derivado suas ideias.’
Os clássicos, como Daston aponta, fizeram isso com particular fervor, e em nenhum lugar mais do que em Oxford. Quando Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor de Grego de 1960 a 1989, publicou uma coleção de ensaios sobre a história de sua disciplina, ele a chamou de Blood for the Ghosts, referindo-se não apenas à cena necromântica na Odisseia de Homero, mas também a um discurso célebre sobre a escrita histórica grega proferido por Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, o mais famoso classicista alemão de sua geração, em uma visita a Oxford em 1908. Agora, Oswyn Murray, que se aposentou há vinte anos após uma longa carreira ensinando história antiga em Oxford, produziu uma coleção de ensaios historiográficos também dedicados dis manibus, aos espíritos dos que partiram.
Murray, que fez 87 anos este ano, é o último sobrevivente de um triunvirato de acadêmicos que dirigiu o ensino de clássicos no Balliol College durante as últimas décadas do século XX. Seu mandato como bolsista tutorial em história antiga, que se estendeu de 1968 a 2004, foi superado pelo de seu colega Jasper Griffin, que se tornou bolsista em 1961, tendo também sido aluno de graduação em Balliol (seu colega mais jovem Oliver Lyne, que chegou a Balliol em 1971, morreu inesperadamente no cargo em 2005). Em um artigo publicado no boletim informativo de ex-alunos de Balliol em 2004 para marcar sua aposentadoria e a de Griffin, Murray escreveu: "Somos a última geração de classicistas automáticos, vindos de uma era em que uma proporção relativamente alta de meninos e meninas mais brilhantes foi canalizada para as formas do Classical VI e para Oxford e Cambridge."
As conexões de Murray com Oxford remontam a ainda mais tempo. Como ele diz em The Muse of History, ele é bisneto do lexicógrafo James Augustus Henry Murray, o primeiro editor do Oxford English Dictionary, e filho e neto de altos funcionários públicos. Essa genealogia de serviço acadêmico e público é importante para o livro, no qual questões de parentesco e filiação — seja de sangue ou de intelecto — são profundas. Embora nominalmente seja uma coleção de ensaios sobre a escrita da história antiga, alguns novos e alguns publicados anteriormente, The Muse of History é mais gratificante se lido como um livro de memórias: uma tentativa de um historiador antigo (no verdadeiro sentido, brinca Murray) de reunir os fios de sua formação intelectual e oferecer um retrato de si mesmo e de sua disciplina.
Para entender este livro, é preciso ter alguma noção do peso simbólico dos "clássicos Balliol" para a geração de Murray. Uma das faculdades mais antigas de Oxford, no século XIX, a Balliol se transformou, por meio de uma combinação de sólida gestão financeira e exames de bolsa abertos, de uma instituição em dificuldades com números decrescentes de alunos na faculdade acadêmica preeminente da universidade. Sob uma série de mestres progressistas, incluindo Benjamin Jowett, a Balliol adotou aspectos da nova cultura de profissionalismo, relativamente meritocrática e não denominacional, que estava remodelando as elites britânicas vitorianas, e encorajou muitos de seus melhores alunos a fazer exames públicos nas recém-estabelecidas Escolas de Honra. Isso significava que os graduados da faculdade estavam bem posicionados para fazer os exames abertos de serviço público, que foram introduzidos na segunda metade do século e ponderados em favor do conhecimento e das capacidades inculcadas pelo curso de clássicos de Oxford, conhecido formalmente como Literae Humaniores e popularmente como "Greats". Na década de 1850, Jowett fez lobby com políticos para que Oxford garantisse "uma participação nas nomeações indianas"; no final de sua vida, em 1893, seu desejo estava perto de ser realizado. Como W.H. Walsh observa na História da Universidade de Oxford, "no período de 1892 a 1914, quase metade dos ingressantes no Serviço Civil Imperial eram graduados em Oxford, com a consequência de que, em 1938, seis dos oito governadores provinciais da Índia eram Grandes Homens que haviam se formado entre 1897 e 1910". Balliol também produziu uma série de políticos, incluindo Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins e Edward Heath.
A família de Murray pode não ter sido formada por homens de Balliol (ele foi a terceira geração de sua família a estudar do outro lado da rua no Exeter College), mas sua genealogia acadêmica e de serviço público está de acordo com seu ethos, e Murray sugere uma conexão próxima com sua revelação, na legenda de uma fotografia de seu bisavô, de que James Murray deu ao seu filho mais novo o nome de "Jowett". O nexo dos clássicos de Oxford e do poder imperial é crucial para explicar o que pode, de outra forma, parecer aos leitores uma idiossincrasia desconcertante deste livro: sua história da historiografia moderna da história antiga é frequentemente contada como se Oxford fosse o centro do mundo intelectual. O que o torna tão fascinante é que essa perspectiva é temperada por um forte cosmopolitismo, pelo menos no que se refere ao pensamento histórico francês, alemão e italiano. Um dos argumentos de Murray diz respeito ao caráter intelectualmente limitado e derivativo da escrita histórica anglófona, que, em sua opinião, falhou em desenvolver qualquer sofisticação teórica ou conceitual, exceto quando enriquecida por correntes intelectuais europeias. Além de demonstrar ‘a centralidade do estudo do mundo antigo para a compreensão da literatura e do pensamento inglês e continental [ao longo de] três séculos’, Murray quer mostrar ‘a impossibilidade de entender o passado ou o presente fora de nossa herança europeia comum, e nossa dívida com essa herança no passado e no futuro’. Uma reivindicação tão ampla, séria e fundamentalmente política torna este livro mais do que mera necromancia. A piedade filial desempenha um papel, mas Murray está de olho em temas maiores, incluindo o propósito do estudo histórico e o futuro (se houver um; Murray é pessimista nesse ponto) da tradição anglo-europeia – ele a chama de ‘ocidental’ – da história antiga.
Tomando como epígrafe a máxima de Benedetto Croce de que "toda história é história contemporânea", Murray propõe que a historiografia da Europa Ocidental sobre a Grécia e Roma antigas desde o século XVIII gira em torno de dois conceitos, "imperialismo" e "liberdade". A história antiga, ele argumenta, era um modo de reflexão sobre problemas sociais e políticos contemporâneos: o declínio dos modelos monárquicos de governo, o crescimento do poder ultramarino e os desafios da administração imperial, e o avanço das ideias e movimentos políticos liberais e democráticos. Para ilustrar a maneira como isso se desenrolou na prática, ele analisa os paradigmas concorrentes da Atenas e Esparta antigas no pensamento político europeu do século XVIII, o filelenismo romântico e as histórias gregas de homens de letras politicamente ativos, como William Mitford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, John Stuart Mill e George Grote.
Relacionar a escrita histórica dos liberais e utilitaristas do século XIX com suas batalhas políticas não é uma abordagem nova, e conceitualmente essas são algumas das partes menos originais do livro, com Murray contente em adicionar detalhes e floreios ao esboço estabelecido por seu orientador de doutorado, Arnaldo Momigliano. Murray adota muitas das estruturas de Momigliano, como a ideia de que a pesquisa histórica moderna surgiu do encontro metodológico do século XVIII entre philosophes e érudits, embora ele adicione outro retrato à galeria ancestral: "o historiador perdido John Gast", um estudioso irlandês do século XVIII cuja laboriosa história sintética da Grécia antiga foi eventualmente eclipsada por Grote e Mitford. Murray conecta a visão positiva de Gast sobre o impacto da migração na Grécia antiga e seu interesse no declínio da autonomia das cidades gregas sob o domínio macedônio à sua identidade como descendente de refugiados huguenotes, especulando que ele compôs sua História como um aviso oblíquo sobre a prosperidade superficial da Ascendência Protestante Irlandesa.
Murray não toma partido nas disputas que descreve, mas encontra valor na história grega do radical George Grote, que buscou criar uma nova imagem da democracia ateniense a serviço da reforma política, bem como na de William Mitford, cuja fé conservadora nas vantagens únicas da constituição inglesa pós-1688 sustentou sua rejeição tanto de Atenas quanto de Esparta como modelos para futuros políticos. Murray conclui seu capítulo sobre Mitford com um parágrafo extraordinário:
E à medida que entramos no século XXI, que certamente está destinado a ser visto historicamente como a Era da Oligarquia, assim como o século XX foi o da (pseudo-)Democracia, talvez devêssemos... prestar mais atenção à oligarquia, e não apenas como a Lei de Ferro da História... Seja qual for a terminologia oficial, oligarquias efetivas podem ser baseadas em uma aristocracia tradicional de nascimento e posse de terras, nas prerrogativas de uma elite fundadora (como colônias gregas, Israel e América do Sul hispânica), no poder da riqueza (em plutocracias como os EUA e a Grã-Bretanha), em uma elite intelectual (República de Platão e França moderna), no poder militar (Mianmar e Paquistão), na teocracia (os estados islâmicos e a Europa cristã primitiva), na supremacia tribal (África moderna), no controle da mídia (Itália) ou na corrupção organizada sistemicamente (Sicília e Calábria, Colômbia, Rússia e Ucrânia) - e, claro, em uma mistura de qualquer um ou todos esses elementos. A estabilidade das oligarquias e sua capacidade de resistir à mudança social é uma de suas características mais importantes; e, em última análise, Mitford pode estar certo: de todas as variadas formas oligárquicas de consolidação do poder, talvez a mais benigna seja a "patrios politeia", a "constituição mista" baseada na tradição histórica, na visão que une Sólon, Mitford e Políbio com Montesquieu e os Pais Fundadores da constituição americana essencialmente antidemocrática.
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.
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.
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