Why We Are All Athenians

"The Muse of History

By Oswyn Murray

Belknap/Harvard, 528 pages, $37.95

A "myth of the past" is necessary to justify "contemporary preoccupations," writes Oswyn Murray, an emeritus fellow at Oxford. This is a profound realization, and it leads the author to a rousing intellectual defense against what T.S. Eliot called the "provincialism" of the present moment. In an age of media and sensory-enhancing technology that obliterates the past, with all of its lessons, we sometimes no longer seem to be part of a human continuum of the living and the dead, taking sustenance from the trials and tribulations of those who have gone before us. Mr. Murray, to rescue us from the tyranny of the present, studies not only historians but the history of their interpretations, what academics call historiography. This is a noble discipline, since, as the author writes, "in the background of every historian's work is his own contemporary world."

In "The Muse of History" the author focuses on a particular obsession of Western historians over the past three centuries: the ancient Greeks, and to a lesser extent, the Romans, and how both have changed in our perception as we have changed. His book is meandering and often forbiddingly academic in style, yet a patient reader is rewarded with a vast understanding of how a memory of antiquity, always renewed and reinterpreted, has kept us civilized.

The central myth of the West has been the story of the Greeks and Romans (a concomitant interest in Asia and Africa came relatively late in Western intellectual history, Mr. Murray notes). The Greeks offered us a foundational myth of liberty, whereas the Romans offered a myth of world order through imperialism (something far more complex than mere repression, which is the one-dimensional characterization of imperialism popular at the moment).

The author mostly concentrates on the Greeks. He begins with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who in 1629 translated Thucydides' "The Peloponnesian War" in order to explore the political distinctions and value systems of Athens and Sparta. Hobbes, echoing Thucydides, preferred the government of the best (hoi aristoi) over the many (hoi polloi), thus favoring Sparta over Athens, even as he knew that, in Mr. Murray's words, the "ultimate ideal lay in the monarchical leadership of Pericles" in Athens. This attitude was a reflection of Hobbes's own time and philosophical inclinations; the English Civil War would soon cause him to favor strong governance as a means to prevent anarchy, as he expressed in "Leviathan" (1651).

Hobbes laid the groundwork for the systematic study of Greek history that would begin in the 18th century: A relentless comparison between Athens and Sparta breathed oxygen into the Enlightenment. While in our own era Athenian democracy has been judged far superior to Spartan oligarchy, that was not always the case. Western historians before the age of mass democracy judged Sparta's mixed regime as having admirable attributes, including an equal division of land, excellent education of youth and obedience toward the elderly. In 1767 Adam Ferguson, the most influential voice of the Scottish Enlightenment, wrote about Sparta that "every institution of this singular people gave a lesson of obedience, of fortitude, and of zeal for the public" good.

The comparative lack of sympathy for Athens is explained -- and this is the theme of Mr. Murray's book -- simply by the times in which these historians and philosophers wrote. In the 18th century, basic order was not taken for granted, since sturdy institutions were only in the process of development. The unruly nature of Athenian democracy was seen as a dangerous luxury. By contrast, the Spartan city-state had existed by some measurements for more than half-a-millennium, which gave it a deserved reputation for stability that impressed Enlightenment thinkers.

This orthodoxy was challenged by the 18th-century Dutch Abbe Cornelius de Pauw, who wrote on the eve of the French Revolution about the attributes of the Athenian system. He was ignored by the elite of his era but his defense of Athens proved prescient, as the 19th century would bring trade, a revolution in manufacturing and an era of political upheaval. This overturned the aristocratic respect for Sparta that had been synonymous with the Enlightenment.

This is an exceedingly complicated story, as Mr. Murray reveals. Yet the intensity and subtlety of these intellectual arguments about Athens and Sparta allowed thinkers to think more clearly about their own era. The English historian William Mitford, in his multivolume "History of Greece" (1784-1810) declared that he could not idealize either Athens or Sparta since they were clearly inferior to Britain's institutionalized system and Athens, in any case, relied on slavery, making it not a free society at all.

John Stuart Mill once wrote that the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., during the first Persian invasion of Greece, was "even as an event in British history . . . more important than the Battle of Hastings." So, too, Athens and Sparta were, in a philosophical sense, the most important cities in the West during the Enlightenment. Indeed, upon the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the debate about Athens and Sparta was left behind, as the model of the Athenian victory over the Persians at Marathon, in Mr. Miller's words, "established the close connection between military success, liberty, and democratic government." The West was now in an age of strong states, meaning democracy was no longer a luxury but an imperative, and in the final analysis could only be defended from other states by military prowess.

Philosophy as a discipline had given way: Mr. Murray writes that the 19th century "began the Age of History in which society was embedded in a nexus of causation stretching back into the distant past." In an age of revolutions, Roman imperialism came to represent the ancien regime in France; Athens exemplified liberty and progress. John Stuart Mill's father made him study Greek because of this.

The 19th century also brought to the fore powerful new forces of modern culture and mass psychology. The examination of ancient Greece shifted as a consequence, according to Mr. Murray. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche separately emphasized the "agonal" aspect of ancient Greece: that is, the contest among personalities and political forces in Athens. Burckhardt proved the relevance of ancient history when he wrote about the ability of Greek demagogues to manipulate the masses and thus threaten to create the most frightening forms of tyranny. In this manner, by way of ancient Greece, Burckhardt looked back to the terror of the French Revolution and, albeit unknowingly, forward to 20th-century fascism. The study of antiquity shows a historical continuum.

Then there is the person of Socrates, who in the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the early 19th century "constitutes a great historic turning point." Socrates, by his persistent questioning, revealed the answers to philosophical questions but also undermined the stability of Athens, since even an exemplary city-state has to rely on some degree of coercion. Socrates thus furthered Greek thought even as he worked to destabilize the social contract as it was then understood. Moral values cut two ways, the author suggests, and the lack of an easy answer demonstrates the richness of the Greek tradition in Western thought. Socrates is the first Greek we can really know as an individual. The story of Socrates in 19th-century German thought, Mr. Murray writes, constitutes "an attempt to find a replacement for the Christ figure in a secularized society."

In the latter part of this difficult yet reflective book, the author calls the Frenchman Fernand Braudel "the greatest historian of the 20th century." A bold claim, yet an accurate one. Braudel broke new ground by combining the study of geography and vast social and economic forces with individual agency. He was thus a partial and hesitant determinist. His monumental work, "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II" (1949), written largely while a prisoner of the Nazis, is a global history that enhances and diminishes the role of ancient Greece.

The continuous sequence of upheavals and catastrophes that leads to the present reminds Mr. Murray of a passage by the mid-20th-century German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin's, who described an image of an angel caught in a storm that propels him backward, into the future, while the pile of debris before him grows higher and higher. "This storm," Benjamin explains, "is what we call progress." And through it all, the memory of ancient Greece may be the best compass we have.

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Mr. Kaplan is the author of "Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis," forthcoming in January. He holds a chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute." [1]

1.REVIEW --- Books: Why We Are All Athenians. Kaplan, Robert D.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 Sep 2024: C.7.