Historiography, the history of history, is a richly complex subject, which asks why history has been written the way it has. Ever mindful of the truth factor in the portrayal of the past, it seeks out the ways it has been told and the most accurate ways it can be told. "History is written by victors" is perhaps the most common adage of historiography, and indubitably a false one. Victors may set out their own record of the past, but the past, on closer examination, is more complicated than their imagining. For the historiographer more, much more, is involved in history than a record of its winners and losers.

Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present provides an account of both how history has been written and the theories, conscious and unconscious, that have supported its various leading versions over the past three centuries. A retired Oxford don whose speciality is the world of classical antiquity, Murray is the great-grandson of James Murray, the founding editor of The Oxford English Dictionary.

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