The Muse of History

How the modern world has understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter today

The study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture in the twentieth century.

Through the work of different historians, including Burckhardt and Braudel, and others newly discovered, the book creates a rich picture of a European approach to history. It also draws on the wide variety of philosophical approaches from Hobbes to Foucault that have influenced interpretation of the Greeks, showing the limits of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the ambiguities of democracy, and the difficulty of understanding the past without the present.