In the first chapter of The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present, the distinguished Oxford historian Oswyn Murray announces his intentions: “In order to liberate ourselves from tradition and prevent the preoccupations of the present and its past from distorting the future of history, we must investigate the roots of our current concerns.” Vice President Kamala Harris might say he’s interested in unburdening what can be from what has been. Luckily, though, he fails to do this—which makes for a much more interesting book.

Murray sets out to produce a history of ancient Greek history, the subject he taught for almost 40 years at Oxford’s Balliol College, until his retirement in 2004. What he comes up with is really a history of leftist historical thought in Europe, specifically the strains of it that produced him. The tale begins sweepingly enough in the seventeenth century with Thomas Hobbes introducing Thucydides to the English-speaking public. But somewhere down the line Murray’s focus starts narrowing until he’s devoting whole chapters to things like the life and legacy of J. -P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the French theorists who “created the scholarly world we all now inhabit.”

That’s accurate if “we” means the generation of English scholars whose minds were blown in the ’60s and ’70s by the titillating Gallic notion that Greek myth and tragedy were subtle political commentaries, rather than mere textual objects floating free of time. No doubt the sleepy dons of Oxbridge needed shaking up a bit in those days, but the result was hardly the creation of a new world. Ironically, for a book that begins and ends with casual remarks about “the poverty of the Western tradition,” The Muse of History ends up mired in the intellectual parochialism of our siloed academy. This is why Murray can assure us that the moral abominations of the Soviet Union and a global death toll in the tens of millions haven’t discredited Marxism as a theory, because “few would deny the central Marxist conception that it is the economy which determines the basic types of human society.”

Actually, there are plenty of people who would deny that, but Murray has written them out of his story. Conservative scholars Barry Strauss and Paul Rahe are dismissed as practitioners of “the modern American school of historical ideology,” whatever that is. Massively successful historians such as Victor Davis Hanson or Tom Holland get overlooked entirely. G. K. Chesterton is cited as a “novelist,” which is his detractors’ favorite way of relegating his legacy to the Father Brown mysteries to avoid the embarrassment of trying to answer his powerful critiques of socialism and atheism. Leo Strauss, whose philosophical approach to antiquity was at bare minimum just as influential as Vernant’s, gets passingly name-checked. In other words, Murray achieves an illusion of consensus only by sidelining anyone who might contradict or simply ignore the idea that Marx and the French post-structuralists set the terms of all scholarship. He tells us that all serious thinkers are Marxists, but what he really means is that only Marxists count as serious thinkers. This is hardly a novel gambit for academics, but it becomes increasingly silly the longer they keep it up. (In the spirit of swapping Oxonian anecdotes, I’ll add that some of Murray’s other omissions have been incisively cataloged by my own Doktorvater, Armand D’Angour.)

What we really have here is an apologia pro vita sua by an accomplished lecturer in the twilight of his years (he jokes winningly that he’s become an “ancient historian” in both senses of the term). In that limited capacity, it’s a learned, humane, and occasionally moving intellectual memoir. But it’s hardly the revolutionary tome it pretends to be. Murray cites Nietzsche’s cutting remark that “for Hegel the apex and culmination of the world process coincided with his own existence in Berlin.” It might equally be said that for Murray the apex and culmination of classical history was the creation of the Warburg Institute, a research library founded in Germany and transferred to London when Nazi race laws endangered its existence and its staff. In a chapter entitled “Saving Civilization,” Murray writes, “The rescue of the Warburg Institute can only be compared with the arrival in Italy of the future Cardinal Bessarion in 1439, fleeing the impending destruction of Byzantium and laden with ancient Greek manuscripts to become the catalyst for the Italian Renaissance.”

The resettlement of persecuted luminaries during World War II is a genuinely inspiring episode in the history of European letters. But once again it’s hard to avoid the impression that we’re viewing it from just the angle that puts Warburg center stage—mostly because it helped create the conditions for Murray to meet his mentor, Arnaldo Momigliano. Momigliano’s escape from Fascist Italy is one dramatic but relatively minor plot point in the epic tale of a global rescue mission.

All over the West, altruists worked desperately under wartime pressure to salvage humanist learning from the autocrats who were laying waste to Europe’s epicenters of civilization. Murray offhandedly faults the United States for reluctance to commit itself fully to the effort, but the truth is governments across the world, including Britain’s, were uncertain how they should react to the sheer enormity of the refugee crisis precipitated by Hitler and the Russian Communists. Private philanthropists and institutions saved whom they could, how they could. The then-great universities of America played a major part in that effort. But so, undoubtedly, did Warburg, assisted by funding and endorsements from the Academic Assistance Council (now the Council for At-Risk Academics).

If Murray gets carried away when he calls the foundation of the Council “the greatest act of generosity ever undertaken within the Republic of Letters,” he’s surely right that it was one of academia’s finest hours, funded initially by British scholars who voluntarily garnished their wages. From among the 2,600 or so intellectuals aided this way, Murray delivers a catalog of prominent names that is bound to inspire a surge of admiration: Albert Einstein, Karl Popper, Eduard Fraenkel, and many more. That Einstein made his eventual home in America, along with Hannah Arendt as well as tens of thousands of others rescued by efforts like President Franklin Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board, makes Murray’s contempt for US involvement seem rather petty. But he’s determined to see what he wants to see. Leo Strauss earns his brief mention in the book by association with the august beneficiaries of the Warburg and the Assistance Council. His subsequent influence on the study of the ancient world is of course passed over, in favor of two chapters on none other than Arnaldo Momigliano.

Momigliano described Western history as a push and pull between contrasting ideas, and especially between the competing goods of liberty and peace. As Murray gracefully summarizes the thesis, “The Greeks understood and indeed created the Western ideal of liberty, but could not reconcile it with the idea of peace; the Romans, who inherited something of the Greek idea of liberty, lost it in the pursuit of peace.” Like the Greeks after the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars, the European powers after the World Wars felt it necessary to diminish their national sovereignty in the formation of leagues and unions. It’s a cogent analysis, and Momigliano’s most salutary effect on Murray was to convince him that history can say something meaningful about both the past and the present, inoculating him against the fashionable arguments of historicist and post-modern cynics who wanted to cast all discourse as a rhetorical power play. Murray’s probing search for a way to transcend relativism and make real sense of the West’s present condition is what makes his book worthwhile reading throughout, despite his blind spots. He really is looking for the truth.

All the same, he’s in a bit of a pickle. A persistent theme of his is that writers of history are always shaped, often unawares, by the fixations of their era. On the subject of Greek mythology, he writes that “every theory proposed has been determined not so much by the evidence as by the needs of the contemporary world to validate its own beliefs.” He seems to pity the naïfs of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries who fancied they were upholding transcendent ideals when they were really acting out their material concerns. Britons who considered themselves heirs to the legacy of ancient Greek freedom fighters were simply validating their conquests: “The British example of a maritime imperial republic of free enterprise made the example of Classical Greece, and especially Athens, more relevant and more comforting” than that of Rome. At one point, Murray calls the views of Charles Darwin “a biological expression of the Victorian belief in progress.” But surely they were also a forthright assertion of Darwin’s belief in evolution. Moreover, if every idea we have arises organically from our culture and our time, how can we possibly “plan a rational future unencumbered by the dead beliefs and charter myths of an earlier generation,” as Murray hopes we will? Put another way, if we exist in the context of all that came before us, how can we ever be unburdened by what has been?

Murray’s escape route from time-bound concerns leads to the Republic of Letters, a band of brothers and sisters extending like the church universal across physical borders. Scholars who devote themselves to the life of the mind enter a blessed state like that of Aristotle’s contemplative man, who attains communion with the timeless godhead by thinking thoughts about thought. Murray, by writing histories about history, thinks he can join the blessed few who understand their local habitation in time and so transcend it, scoffing at “politicians and generals[,] … fools who do not understand the nature of the historical tragedies that they unleash.” From this privileged position of self-awareness, Murray fondly recalls sending books and articles breezing past the Iron Curtain to commune with his fellow scholars in East Germany.

We unfortunates who remain in thrall to anachronisms like national borders can’t help noticing that this stateless Republic of Letters has its limitations. Sometimes its members have performed genuine acts of heroism, as in the case of Vernant’s courageous service for the French resistance under Hitler’s occupation. But since those glory days, the worthies of the professional academy have descended from fighting actual Nazis to seeing fictional ones around every corner. This is evident not only in Murray’s overwrought denunciations of his former student Boris Johnson, but also more generally in Western intellectuals’ default skepticism of their patrimony, a prejudice Roger Scruton called oikophobia. It’s a sentiment that reached its extremes on campus in the wake of the October 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel, when undergraduates and some of their professors hoisted the Palestinian flag in place of the American and English ones. If the heirs to the Republic of Letters prefer to rally for a pack of genocidal mobsters half a world away than to honor their fatherlands, maybe scorn for home is its own kind of tribalism.

The scholarly culture that once produced sophisticated, honorable men like Oswyn Murray has lost itself in violent fanaticism and sterile maunderings about race and sex. One reason why becomes evident from reading The Muse of History: for about a century, the academy’s keepers have shown themselves increasingly willing to entertain any idea under the sun except conservative ones, which they would rather wave away or call names than engage. This has produced an intellectual class that fancies itself expansively liberal but ranks among the world’s most blinkered and narrow-minded interest groups.

Though we do need to see beyond our traditions to understand them, we also need to draw from them to recover our balance—and at this late hour, we’ve been “liberated” from them quite enough. The academy Murray describes in these reminiscences sounds nothing short of idyllic. But his book leaves no great wonder why it’s in decline.