The History of History
Historiography, the history of history, is a richly complex subject, which asks why history has been written the way it has. Ever mindful of the truth factor in the portrayal of the past, it seeks out the ways it has been told and the most accurate ways it can be told. “History is written by victors” is perhaps the most common adage of historiography, and indubitably a false one. Victors may set out their own record of the past, but the past, on closer examination, is more complicated than their imagining. For the historiographer more, much more, is involved in history than a record of its winners and losers.
Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present provides an account of both how history has been written and the theories, conscious and unconscious, that have supported its various leading versions over the past three centuries. A retired Oxford don whose speciality is the world of classical antiquity, Murray is the great-grandson of James Murray, the founding editor of The Oxford English Dictionary.
“The mirror of the Greeks,” Murray notes in his introduction, “is the way in which we view ourselves, now and in the future.” Why the Greeks above all other peoples? Because, as a historian much admired by Oswyn Murray, Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), in the introduction to his The Greeks and Greek Civilization, notes: “in their creativeness and their potentialities they seem the representatives of genius on earth, with all the failures and sufferings that this entails. In the life of the mind they reached the frontiers which the rest of mankind cannot permit themselves to fall short of, at least in their attempts to acknowledge and to profit, even where they are inferior to the Greeks in the capacity for achievement.” Burckhardt, quoted by Oswyn Murray, concludes:
And so we shall always be in debt to the Greeks in the perception of the world, where they are close to us; and their admirers in the realm of creative ability, in which they are great, alien and remote from us.
The Muse of History provides a cavalcade of the notable scholars of history. Along with Jacob Burckhardt, Murray provides profiles of various lengths of John Gast, Edward Gibbon, Walter Scott, George Grote, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Gilbert Murray, B.G. Niebuhr, Benedetto Croce, Moses Finley, and others. He has an excellent chapter on Socrates, in which he notes that “from the Platonic dialogue arose the art form of the novel.” An early chapter features the reactions of earlier historians in favor of Athenian or Spartan social and political organization. Another is devoted to the Warburg Institute and the diaspora of German-Jewish scholars who fled Hitler to continue their studies at the Warburg in London. Murray is not fearful of strong judgments. “Fernand Braudel (1902-85) was the greatest historian of the twentieth century,” he writes. Again: The “most significant book on Roman history since the beginning of the [twentieth] century [is] Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution.“
Two chapters of The Muse of History are given over to Arnaldo Momigliano, doubtless the leading historiographer of the modern age. A Jewish Italian who with the rise of fascism departed his position at the University of Turin for a life in England and then in Chicago, Momigliano was among Oswyn Murray’s teachers. For Momigliano, Murray writes, historiography was undertaken not as “a trivial antiquarian pursuit but as the study of historical method, the study of how historical knowledge is attained.” The result was “the most profound interpretation of meaning of ancient history that survives from the twentieth century—something that can still inspire us all to understand today the true meaning of history.”
Momigliano was a member of the editorial board of the American Scholar, and I used to travel with him and Edward Shils to each of the magazine’s four yearly board meetings. As Murray notes, Arnaldo invariably wore rumpled dark suits; he also donned a crumpled Borsalino hat and carried what looked to be five pounds of keys, keys to library carrels kept for him all over the world. Striding with Edward Shils and Arnaldo through the corridors of O’Hare airport, I felt, as I have written elsewhere, as if we three were an intellectual version of the Marx Brothers, with me as the rather plain brother Zeppo.
If a central argument plays through the pages of The Muse of History it is “ancient history as the interplay between great concepts, rather than as the history of events and political and military power struggles of a long-dead civilization.” The meaning of history, in Murray’s view, is not to be found so much in cause and effect, nor in the emergence or want of great men to engage with great events, though neither can these be entirely eliminated: Economic depressions, surely, have causes; and without Winston Churchill, the outcome of World War II might have been quite different. But Murray’s larger argument is one against positivism.
In The Muse of History, positivism is contrasted with empiricism: “Empiricism is the spirit of inquiry, without which history cannot exist; positivism is the refusal to think.” Murray writes: “When we stop thinking, we are most of us positivists most of the time. But we must continue to stop thinking, or most of us will be set about by doubts. For how do we justify the common-sense assumptions we all make”—or, I would add, that grand theories of history supply. Marxism, for example, posits the ultimate historical triumph of the proletariat, Darwinism the ultimate survival of the fittest. Murray feels that the study of the past to understand the present is largely unjustified, and he quotes Frances Yates, whom he calls “the great historian of the imagination” on this point:
History as it actually occurs is not quite the whole of history, for it leaves out of account the hopes that never materialized, 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.
In The Muse of History Oswyn Murray sets out four reasons to write history: “The first is the desire for truth. … Secondly, we write history in order to understand the present.” A further use of history “is to enable the individual to escape from the intolerableness of the present. … Finally, we may write history in order to influence the present. To understand the past is to liberate ourselves from it, and to enable ourselves to plan a rational future unencumbered by the dead beliefs and charter myths of an earlier generation.”
Motives for writing history is one thing, motives for reading it another. Most of my own recent reading has been in and about classical Greece and Rome. None has given me as much pleasure. I read this history for a sense not only of the past but for what the past tells us about human nature, motives, possibilities. In Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, and other Greek historians, one finds heroic figures—Themistocles, Pericles, Aristides, and others—unlike any in our day; and thinkers—Solon, Epicurus, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Plutarch, and others—without parallel in the modern era. No figure comparable to Alcibiades—for talent, bravery, daring, and duplicity—has ever walked the earth. Interesting that despite this extraordinary cast of characters—brilliant men of action, profound thinkers, brilliant poets, and dramatists—the Greeks as a nation, owing in good part to their disputatiousness, were never able to establish a hegemony, either among themselves or in the world around them.
Reading the ancient Greeks and reading about them, I feel an exhilarating sense of connection. Jacob Burckhardt, in his The Greeks and Greek Civilization, captures the reason for this feeling with his usual brilliance. “We can never cut ourselves off from antiquity unless we intend to revert to barbarism,” he writes. “The barbarian and the creature of exclusively modern civilization both live without history.” The last words of Burckhardt’s splendid book read: “Though we are also the offspring of peoples who were still wrapped in the sleep of childhood at the time of the great civilizations of antiquity, it is from these that we feel we are truly descended, because they transmitted their soul to us, and their work, their path, their destiny live on in us.”
Precisely.
The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present
by Oswyn Murray
Belknap Press, 528 pp., $37.95
Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books).