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 over the last three centuries, during which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in 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, acknowledging the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture in the twentieth century under totalitarian persecutions. Through the study of different historians, many of them unjustly forgotten, it reveals the problematic nature of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the importance of ideas from the continent of Europe, the ambiguities of democracy, and the inability of understanding the past or the present outside our common European heritage.

The book concludes by offering suggestions for the future study of the Greeks in the context of world history.