All Scholars

Gilbert Murray, OM, FBA, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford 1908-1936, was widely regarded as the leading English Hellenist of his day. For the educated public, on whom he had an impact such as few scholars ever have, he was synonymous with the English tradition of humane letters and scholarship in the service of the cultured life. His impassioned vision of ancient Greece enabled him to bring its literature alive again in vivid and realistic detail, particularly in his translations and interpretations of Greek drama; he almost single-handedly resuscitated Euripides’ fortunes in England, and must be given a large part of the credit for the continued vitality of Greek studies in his country throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. His power of bringing past life alive sprang from the intensity of his involvement in modern life; he was committed with a religious devotion to the ideals of Gladstonian Liberalism, which he tirelessly promoted in a great many capacities, but mainly in connection with the League of Nations. These ideals he saw as the driving force of both Victorian England and Periclean Athens: the ideals of progress, rationalism, and freedom, which he tended to sum up with the single word “civilization.” Very few of his writings were addressed to the professional scholar, and not much of his scholarly work retains its validity today; but his influence on his contemporaries was so diffuse that its effects must still be felt in a thousand undetected ways. And even when the reverberations of his personal influence are no longer felt, he will still be the best example of a certain kind of scholarship that will always have something of value and should never be forgotten.

George Gilbert Aimé Murray was born in Sydney, Australia, into a family of mixed Irish, Welsh, and English heritage. His Irishness, particularly as embodied by his father, was a point of pride, and the origin of his radicalism in politics and skepticism in religion. His childhood experiences in Australia, although undoubtedly romanticized by him in later life, also accounted for certain traits of character such as his resilience and inner strength of purpose; his schoolboy experiences with bullying induced a keen aversion to cruelty in any form. His father died when he was seven; in January 1877, when he was eleven, his mother took the family back to England.

Beginning in the autumn of 1878 Murray was a day-boy at Merchant Taylors’ School, his entrance made possible by a scholarship. The evidence for these years, slight though it is, is sufficient to show a precocious boy hard at work, learning and loving his classics, and coming to conclusions at an early age on life’s great questions. He discovered Mill and Shelley (especially the Prometheus Unbound, whose spiritual values he imbibed unmixed); other influences were Tennyson, Swinburne, Rousseau and Comte. His special aptitude for Greek poetry, encouraged by his teacher Francis Storr (1839-1919), was evident from the start. At the age of fifteen he turned parts of the Prometheus Unbound into Greek verse, and he was awarded spectacular marks on the examination for the scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, whither he duly went in autumn 1884.

During the summer he spent a month with the celebrated teacher J. Y. Sargent (1829-1915), whose coaching in Latin composition helped him win the Hertford Scholarship during his first year for accomplishment in the art; more impressively, he also won the Ireland Scholarship for Latin and Greek (competition for which was open to all undergraduates, not just those in the first two years). It was a feat seldom achieved before or since; and in an age when classical education consisted almost entirely in prose and verse composition, it must be evidence of an astonishing aptitude for the ancient languages. To later generations the emphasis on verse composition in Victorian education has seemed grossly exaggerated; but it could encourage the kind of familiarity with the ancient texts that has always been the foundation of the greatest English scholarship. Murray not only knew large tracts of Greek poetry by heart, he was gifted with literary understanding and a measure of historical insight; he understood that such a skill was only the beginning, not the end, of classical scholarship.

Murray’s star continued to shine at Oxford throughout the following four years. He took the Gaisford prizes for Greek prose and verse composition and the Chancellor’s prize for Latin verse composition. The teachers he most loved were T. C. Snow (1852-1926) at St. John’s and Arthur Sidgwick (1840-1920) at Corpus Christi, the former a classic Oxford eccentric, the latter the guru of Greek composition; both reinforced the tendency of Murray’s previous education and kept him away from such tentative influences of German scientific scholarship as were to be found in the Oxford of the day. The Arabist D. S. Margoliouth (1858-1940), the Latinist Robinson Ellis (1834-1913), and the High Churchman Charles Gore (1853-1932) of Pusey House were further influences; the latter cured him of his anticlericalism, although he failed to persuade him of the truth of Christianity. In his leisure hours Murray began to speak out in favor of Radical Liberal causes and showed the first signs of his literary aspirations by writing an adventure novel entitled Gobi or Shamo. The book, which was eventually published, requires no special discussion here; but it is notable for its theme of civilization surrounded by seas of barbarism, already a leading idea in Murray’s humanistic philosophy.

Immediately after finishing his undergraduate degree Murray was elected a Fellow of New College, Oxford. He was not to stay there long; in July 1889 he was the surprise choice for the chair of Greek at the University of Glasgow, recently vacated by Richard Jebb’s (1841-1905) promotion to Cambridge. The income enabled him to marry Mary Howard (1865-1956), eldest daughter of the (soon to be) Earl of Carlisle. With her he began a lifelong love affair of Shelleyan proportions, not without its trials to keep the thing in perspective. With her, too, he began his crusade-like work in Liberal causes, for she was a believer like the rest of her family—in particular her imperious mother, the Countess of Carlisle (1845-1921), a formidable figure intimately bound up with Murray’s public activities from this time until her death in 1921. But at first the young professor had little time for such things. At Glasgow he had to contend with large audiences of demanding students, as well as the hostility of a Conservative establishment and a faculty resentful of so young an incumbent of the prestigious chair. But he set to work with zest, and soon won converts, particularly among the students. They warmed to the dramatic style and lively re-creations of his lectures, delivered in unfaltering, rhythmically beautiful prose and an enviably melodious voice.

He published nothing at first; but in 1897 the first edition of A History of Ancient Greek Literature appeared, covering the period from Homer to Demosthenes. It is a peculiar work, uncertain of its audience and uneven in content. That Murray thought he could write it at all, as his first book at the age of thirty-one, tells us as much about the standards of contemporary scholarship as it does about Murray. He admits in the preface that he was unhappy with the balance of what he calls “the scientific and aesthetic sides” of his subject. The clash is most obvious in the first chapter on Homer; he wrote the book with the professed aim of communicating the importance of ancient poetry for modern life, but instead of beginning with the poetry of the epics he plunges into the thickets of the Homeric question and barely emerges from them in time for chapter two. Yet the book is not without value or interest; at least it was fairly well accepted by the reading public, being reissued as late as 1966. The Homeric chapter, despite its inadequacy, contains the germ of The Rise of the Greek Epic; the Euripidean chapter contains the germ of Euripides and His Age. The preface has biographical interest: it trumpets the gospel of the Greeks as real people, not classical abstracts or “fleshly” aesthetes who need to be re-created by an effort of historical imagination; already this is the keynote of his approach, sounded again (for example) in his Oxford inaugural lecture of 1909. The preface also mentions, in connection with the search for realism, the “Greek of the anthropologist," providing an early reference to Murray’s absorption with this branch of study; and it acknowledges as his two main “teachers” T. C. Snow and “Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff (1848-1931) of Göttingen, whose historical insight and singular gift of imaginative sympathy with ancient Greece seem to me to have changed the face of many departments of Hellenic study within the last fifteen years.” Wilamowitz was Murray’s hero in scholarship all his life. Here he calls him his “teacher,” although at that time he knew him only from his books and a correspondence just three years old. Wilamowitz’s commentary on Euripides’ Herakles (1889) had overwhelmed Murray when he first read it at Glasgow; he was dazzled by the range, depth, and focus of its learning, and especially by the way it brought the Greeks alive. This ability lay at the heart of both men’s scholarship, so Murray’s attraction to Wilamowitz and his friendly reception by him are no surprise.

In 1896 Murray was invited by the Oxford University Press to produce an edition of all the plays of Euripides. He had been planning a series of editions of individual plays in collaboration with other scholars, as well as a Euripidean lexicon. He had written to Wilamowitz for advice on these projects in 1894; with the change in plans he wrote again for information on the manuscripts. Wilamowitz responded with copies of his own collations and advice about where to find others; he was later involved at all stages of production, contributing many notes and conjectures and reading the proofs. Murray was almost entirely dependent on this help for his knowledge of the manuscripts; only after the first volume appeared in January 1902 did he do any extensive collating of his own. Well-read though he was in the works of Wilamowitz and other German scholars, and much as he drew inspiration from them, Murray never learned the secret of their professionalism, and his previous training left him poorly qualified for the technical aspects of editing a classical text. Yet the edition was a success, not only because of Wilamowitz’s cooperation. Murray’s sure sense of Euripidean idiom enabled him to produce a more sensible text than that of many previous editors who were inclined to irresponsible meddling. It became the standard text of Euripides in English-speaking countries for seventy-five years; the third volume is still in use.

Murray worked incredibly hard at Glasgow, with eventual cost to his health. He felt obliged to resign his chair in 1898. For the next seven years he and his family lived in Surrey, supported mainly by his mother-in-law. He continued his work of editing Euripides, wrote regularly in the liberal press, and toyed with the idea of running for Parliament. He also entered the world of letters with two original plays, Carlyon Sahib and Andromache (a revision of the old legend for modem times); in spite of some clear merits, they were not commercial successes. Two other original plays never reached the stage. But these failures, besides introducing him to certain leading figures such as William Archer and Bernard Shaw, gave him invaluable practical experience in the theater and turned him from original composition to translation, where his real talent lay. In 1902 the first of his famous translations of Euripides appeared. Over the next fifty years he was to translate nine plays of Euripides, four of Sophocles, all seven surviving of Aeschylus, three of Aristophanes, and two of Menander; they were reprinted many times and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. They often provided the text for professional productions; indeed, the first performance of a Murray translation, the Hippolytus in 1904, was a hit. Famous theater people like Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) and Dame Sybil Thorndike (1882-1976) were eager promoters of this newly discovered drama; Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) mounted an extravagant production of Oedipus Tyrannus at Covent Garden in 1912. Professional performances were not infrequent during the next fifty years; they were greatly outnumbered, however, by amateur stagings. Dramatic societies found the Greek drama affordable to produce, with its few main characters to be costumed and its sparse sets, and the Murray idiom rolled easily and beautifully from the lips of less-than-talented actors. The style of the translations bias been severely criticized, most famously by T. S. Eliot; the density of facile devices and the use of rhyme did not recommend the poetry to his fastidious taste. In not much time, many people agreed with Eliot; today his blank verse translations in the History of Greek Literature seem much more effective. But when they first appeared the translations perfectly suited the age, and whatever one may think of them, their technical mastery and their languorous beauty cannot be denied.

Murray was sufficiently famous in the London theater world to be recognized by audiences as the subject of Shaw’s entertaining caricature in Major Barbara (1905), where he is Adolphus Cusins; other members of the Murray family figure as the title character (Lady Mary) and Lady Britomart (The Countess of Carlisle). But the life of a literary lion was not for Murray in the end; he longed to return to academic life, and in 1905 an opportunity arose to return to New College, Oxford. Three years later he was appointed to succeed Ingram Bywater as Regius Professor of Greek, an appointment he held until succeeded by E. R. Dodds in 1936. Most of his major works were written during this period, in spite of the great amount of time he spent on political causes. The Rise of the Greek Epic arose from a series of lectures at Harvard University; it is probably his best book. It tried to reconcile the conflicting views of analysts and Unitarians by using the concept of the “traditional book” (on the analogy of the Old Testament); it is largely successful in this aim, although most of its discussion has now been superseded by the discoveries of Milman Parry (1902-35). It includes a great wealth of material on almost anything remotely connected with Homeric studies; but all this information is marshalled together and made to move forward in a clear and focused manner. Murray also succeeds in creating a vivid sense of the historical context in which the Homeric epics are to be understood. For these qualities the book greatly impressed his contemporaries; it provided them through all its four editions with a convenient orientation in Homeric problems and is still a useful guide to the state of the Homeric question at the time. From a biographical point of view the book is significant for the theme of Greek literature as an example of progress; for Murray, the epics represented the first great step forward toward high civilization. The morally improving qualities of the poem are what interested him; but in this connection the gods of Homer posed certain difficulties that Murray was hard put to solve. For romantic reasons he wanted the gods to be real and supposed they were real enough at some point before Homer; but he cannot take Homer’s gods seriously and imposes the same attitude upon the poet himself. The unworthy crudities and moral shortcomings of the gods are not Homer’s doing; they are unfortunate remnants of the “primeval slime” clinging to one only recently emerged from it. He heralds Homer’s religious enlightenment; yet he argues that Homer’s “scepticism” meant death for the old gods. The tragedians, Murray continues, fortunately understood the better side of the Homeric gods and resuscitated them in even more glorious form; but as pure symbols they could have no reality whatsoever.

Of course, hardly anybody in Murray’s day would take the Greek gods totally seriously. Murray at least wanted to take them somewhat seriously. The basic weakness in understanding springs from the pervasive influence of Christianity in his society, not from Murray himself. It is evident again in a book devoted purely to the subject, Four Stages of Greek Religion (later Five Stages when a chapter on the philosophical schools was added). This book, in its first form a series of lectures at Columbia University, was a reaction to Jane Harrison’s (1850-1928) exaltation of the chthonic spirits in Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis (books that Murray nevertheless greatly admired and contributed to). Murray wished to show that the enlightened Olympian ideals of the fifth century B.C. represented the very best of Greek civilization. The preceding stage of religion out of which the Olympian splendor emerged is described in terms favored by the anthropology of the day; “mana" is the central concept. This, incidentally, reveals the main reason he was so intrigued by the new science: to understand civilization one must understand where it came from, and anthropology provided the key. Murray’s interest was first excited by the writings of Andrew Lang; his active promotion of anthropology and the classics made him the only outside member of the “Cambridge Group” of Jane Harrison, James Frazer (1854-1941), F. M. Cornford (1874-1941), and A. B. Cook (1868-1952). Great advance as it was, however, the Olympian religion failed in the end, partly because the superstitious substratum was too well-established at the popular level, partly because it failed to reach monotheism (here the modern prejudice is plain), and partly because the collapse of the polis created new needs. In the new climate the Greeks experienced a “failure of nerve” in which they turned to the mystery religions for salvation. Murray regarded Christianity as one of these; the influence of Richard Reitzenstein (1861-1931) is explicit. For Murray, religion was mostly superstition, Christianity not excepted; agnostic himself, he believed only in what he called the “great unknown” or “uncharted” regions of life to which one must necessarily have a relation, but a relation to be kept enlightened and rational at all costs. It was congenial to him to believe the latest discoveries that Christianity was just a religion like any other. (He was, it should be added, very sympathetic to the general moral teaching of Christianity, greatly admiring St. Paul; he preferred Stoics to Epicureans; and he often used the terms “Christian” and “Hellenic” civilization as equivalents, stressing the supposed identity of their ideals and joint role in the formation of modern Europe.)

In 1913 Murray published his most famous book, Euripides and His Age. Produced for the Home University Library of which he was an editor, it was a small book intended for the general reader; its Wilamowitzian purpose of putting Euripides in historical context was, however, identical with that of The Rise of the Greek Epic, and audiences of all kinds responded warmly. Blessed with a clear, novel, and convincing thesis, which was presented moreover in memorable prose, the book set out an interpretation of Euripides that was to be canonical for decades. Murray portrayed Euripides as a rational critic of tradition, a progressive promoter of social causes, and a wise agnostic in religion. Some important influences on Murray’s criticism deserve recognition, in particular the Cambridge scholar Arthur W. Verrall (1851-1912); but it must be pointed out that Murray made important modifications to Verrall’s at times preposterous picture of “Euripides the Rationalist.” Jane Harrison’s idea of the year-spirit was, however, accepted wholeheartedly, and championed by Murray to the end of his days; he thought that certain standard plots of tragedy and comedy (even Menander!) derived from the old chthonic religion and retained their ritual significance for the audience. Apart from this aberration, however, Murray’s conception won wide assent. Nowadays it seems obvious that he read too much of his own day into Euripides; he made him a social critic in the manner of Ibsen, who was translated into English by his friend William Archer (1856-1924) (Murray drew the parallel himself often enough). Yet our Euripides—an existentialist reflector of humanity in all of its horrors and sublimities, scarcely to be credited with a consistent philosophy from one moment to the next—is suspiciously appropriate to our milieu; if we blame Murray too quickly for seeing himself in his ancient brother, we must be prepared to answer a charge of pot and kettle. In fact, both views have their strengths, and Murray even now cannot be dismissed out of hand.

The war years and the 1920s saw Murray increasingly occupied with public duties, which it is impossible to treat adequately here. The list of his offices is impressive enough: Chairman of the Executive of the League of Nations Union (1918-1919), Vice Chairman (1919-1922), Chairman (1922-1938), joint President with Lord Robert Cecil from 1938 (at its height the organization numbered over 600,000 members); Chairman of the League of Nations Committee for Intellectual Cooperation from 1928 until its absorption by UNESCO in 1951; joint President with Lord Lytton of the United Nations Association (1945-1947); sole President (1947-1949); joint President with Dame Kathleen Courtney (1949-1957). In these capacities Murray showed an extraordinary flair for diplomacy and practical organization, surprising to many who judged him by his serene, unworldly exterior and the idealism of his writings. In fact, he possessed clear vision and a keen sense of people; his political skill saw the LNU and the League itself through many anxious moments. It can be argued that his most important work for humanity was done here.

At a quick glance it might appear that Murray tried to have two rather incompatible careers. It seemed so to one Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, who became anxious that the Regius Professor might be neglecting his academic duties. Murray was not neglecting them and saw no conflict between his two spheres of activity. The ideals of Hellenism and liberalism were identical for him; and as a rationalist, a conviction that a cause was right meant he was obliged to take action in its favor. The possibility of progress had only once before in history been truly understood; tragedy had averted its realization, but after many centuries the same spark had kindled new flame. It was his duty to tend the flame however he could.

Murray’s convictions informed everything he did in life. His purpose was ultimately one of gospel spreading; like Wilamowitz, he conceived his function as a professor exclusively in terms of teaching, not research. Hence the conscious amateurism of his work. Even in the book with the most technical stuff, The Rise of the Greek Epic, the learned details are always subordinate to his didactic purposes. In large stretches of it, indeed, he is merely dependent on his favorite authorities; he does not really go behind them to the manuscripts, scholia, and monuments as a professional would. Murray was not interested in the cold facts for their own sake; they had to be made warm in an historical context so that one could understand their real significance and extract lessons from them for the modern age. If the lessons were not communicated to one’s pupils—among whom Murray could count the general public—Greek literature could no longer be a living influence on contemporary society. He rightly saw that technical research does not contribute directly to this effort. It is remarkable that the Regius Professor hardly ever wrote an article in a professional journal.

The essential continuity of ancient and modern literature, and the half-forlorn hope that the amateur might be given pride of place in talking about it, formed the basis of Murray’s Norton lectures of 1926, which were published the following year under the title The Classical Tradition in Poetry. The book’s principal aim was to illustrate how the forms and qualities of ancient literature have survived in the poetic tradition; if Murray had confined himself to this, it would have been a diverting catalogue of a highly cultivated man’s mental treasures. He also tried, however, to show his readers what good poetry ought to be (mostly, he says, it ought to be beautiful); Murray’s remarks on this subject are amateurish in a bad sense and came in for some criticism. In his next two books, Aristophanes: A Study and Aeschylus, The Creator of Tragedy, Murray stuck to Greek subjects. Once again the amateur is unrepentant: the preface of the latter states that it is “not, in the stricter sense, learned,” while the preface of the former opens with the startling words, “There is little or no research in this book.” Like most of his works they were intended to demonstrate the existence of liberal ideas in the ancient poets; with Euripides Murray may have had a case, but not with these two. The failure is particularly embarrassing in Aristophanes, whose crudity and ruthlessness are not to be argued away.

In the same decade Murray produced his Oxford text of Aeschylus, whom he edited along the same lines as Euripides; but the standards of the day would no longer tolerate it, and the edition has never been highly regarded, not even after revision in 1955. Murray was by now getting old; his political ideals had long been superseded, and his style of scholarship seemed dated. But he lost none of his vigor, his essential happiness, or his strength of conviction. He continued to write prolifically in the name of his great causes; Stoic, Christian and Humanist (1940; rev. ed. 1950) and Hellenism and the Modem World (1953) are buoyant expressions of his faith. He carried on to the day he died his constant run of lectures, letters to the press, addresses, and broadcasts, all bearing his message to the multitudes. His liberalism was no vague sense of do-goodism, but an intelligent acceptance of the Gladstone system; nor did it turn into socialism at any point. At its heart was the belief in the progress of humanity toward an ideal civilization. Sometimes his actions seemed to other liberals to be inconsistent with this goal, as when, in 1914, he supported the war effort (he broke with his wife’s cousin, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), over the issue); but given a choice, as he saw it, between peace and civilization, Murray could only choose the latter. When, in his last years, he astonished everyone by voting conservative and supporting Prime Minister Anthony Eden (1897-1977) in the Suez crisis, he was being perfectly consistent in refusing to condone ochlocracy or the treatment of barbarians on an equal footing with the civilized.

Murray’s ability to curb his will to the dictates of reason was only one aspect of his remarkable character. Those who knew him refer consistently to his charm, courtesy, hospitality, and wonderful talk. He was blessed with a developed sense of the absurd, which not only produced many moments of the most delightful whimsy in his writings and conversation but kept his puritanical tendencies more or less in their place. His evident happiness and serenity seemed won by inner self-discipline and were therefore the more to be admired. He and Lady Mary were angels of mercy to the refugees and needy of war-torn Europe. His courtesy even to his rudest adversaries never failed; but his gentle exterior concealed an ardent soul fired by the noblest passions. He was a stranger to academic pettiness; he was the kind of person humanistic scholarship ought to produce but so rarely does in spite of its fine talk. When he died on 20 May 1957, he had won the reputation of a secular saint. His ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey.