BMCR 2009.03.10, Christopher Stray, Gilbert Murray Reassessed

Christopher Stray (ed.), Gilbert Murray Reassessed. Hellenism, Theatre,
and International Politics.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007.
Pp. xii, 400.  ISBN 978-0-19-920879-1.  $120.00.

Reviewed by Giuliana Scalera McClintock, Universita\ degli Studi di
Salerno ([email protected])
Word count:  1312 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0802/2007299707.html)

Regius professor at Oxford from 1908 to 1936, Gilbert Murray was one of
the foremost Hellenists of his time. He participated in the revolution
of classical studies carried out by the Cambridge Ritualists and, with
his more moderate position in relation to his Cantabrigian colleagues
(he shared Wilamowitz's antipathy for the primitive), contributed to
the diffusion of their ideas: the underlying ritual structure in Greek
drama, the Dionysiac metamorphosis of the eniautos daimon or year
spirit, the sacramental theory of sacrifice. His teaching was
transmitted to a generation of scholars who influenced key strands of
research over the ensuing decades, above all in the field of historical
anthropology. One thinks in particular of E. R. Dodds, who always
remembered Murray's lessons on the Bacchae as the most stimulating
intellectual experience in his student days at Oxford.

The text, edited by C. Stray, which for the most part gathers papers
given at a conference on Gilbert Murray held in 2005 at the Institute
of Classical Studies (University of London), reconstructs the complex
intellectual biography of the scholar.  The papers cover in depth the
whole range of Murray's activities, from the work of translator to that
of propagandist for Greek studies, and that of promoter of
international peace through his leading role in the  League of Nations,
of which he was a founder.  The result is not only a multi-faceted
portrait of Murray, but also a detailed fresco of late-Victorian
England and of the cultural ferment of the first half of the 20th
century that had as protagonists other eminent figures such as F.
Macdonald Cornford, Jane Harrison, Bernard Shaw, and Bertrand Russell.

The book opens with a remembrance of two of Murray's grandchildren (Ann
Paludan and Alexander Murray, pp. 17-32) and a reconstruction of the
scholar's childhood in Australia (Francis West, pp. 31-48).

Dedicated to his work as a classicist are the contributions of Mark
Griffith (who dwells on the two main phases, or modes, of Murray's
career as scholar, pp. 51-80), Christopher Collard (on his critical
editions, pp. 103-132), James Morwood (on the translations of
tragedies, pp.133-144) and Robert Parker (on the writings on Greek
Religion, pp. 81-102).

On his role as committed intellectual -- an aristocratic liberal with
some traces of ideological ambiguity -- focus the essays by William
Bruneau (Murray's politics is analyzed through his clash/encounter with
Russell, pp. 201-216), by Martin Ceadel (who confronts the energetic
involvement in international politics of Murray's adult life and the
conservatism of his last years, pp. 217-237), by Peter Wilson (on
Murray's legacy to the field of International Relations, pp. 239-260),
and by Julia Stapleton (on Murray's conception of Hellenism in relation
to  political and intellectual twentieth-century liberalism, pp.
261-291).

Barbara F. McManus and Mick Morris concentrate on Murray's role as
mentor and promulgator. The first paper relates Murray's work of
promotion for J. A. K. Thomson, the classical scholar who became his
literary executor (pp. 181-199), while the second analyses the role
that his broadcasting with the BBC  played in promoting the two causes
that were dearest to him: Greek studies and Internationalism (pp.
293-317). The latter paper includes comprehensive listings of Murray's
broadcasts.

Two essays close the book: William Bruneau and Russell Wodell on
Murray's letters to The Times (pp. 319-348) and N. J. Lowe on Murray's
involvement in parapsychology. Lowe's contribution includes also an
example of the performances with family and friends through which
Murray sometimes put to a test his capacity for telepathy (pp.
319-348). This was not a mere matter of eccentricity, because interest
in the paranormal at the beginning of the century was in the air.
Murray was president in 1915 and still later in 1952 of the Society for
Psychical Research, which numbered among its members Frederic Myers and
Andrew Lang, pioneers of conjugating the study of the ancient world
with paranormal themes, philosophers such as William James and Bergson,
politicians such as Gladstone and Arthur Balfour, and writers such as
Tennyson, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Fiona Macintosh's essay on the fortunes of Murray's translation of the
Bacchae (pp. 145-165) has been positioned by the editor as a watershed
between the section dedicated to the classicist and the section
dedicated to the internationalist and promulgator. On the other hand,
it is in theatrical performances that the ancient world entered into
contact with the modern world and the interaction between past and
present was perhaps the most characteristic trait of Murray's work.

Published fifty years after Murray's death, the book is not only well
organized and full of information, but in some way in spite of the
large variety of perspectives, it succeeds in sketching a unitary
portrait of the scholar who, looking to the irrational in an attitude
that varied between attraction and reluctance, always maintained his
Olympic profile and did not sacrifice to the archaic the progress of
reason. Parker writes that "his greatest enthusiasm was for Stoicism, a
fully developed philosophical system" (p. 84).

My only doubt is that the homogeneity of judgement reached by the
collection risks consigning Murray to the dusty fate of books opened
again only for the curiosity of the historian. His work as scholar from
this point of view would belong only to the history of historiography
and would not be able to offer ideas to those who today deal with the
same themes. Mark Griffith acutely underlines the disappearance of
Murray in all recent specialized bibliographies (p. 58) and Stray ends
his Introduction (pp.1-15) with these words of Dodds: "Whether he is to
be ranked with the greatest scholars depends on one's conception of
scholarship; but that he was a truly great man no one who knew him
could doubt" (p.15).

It remains to be asked if Murray as scholar doesn't deserve something
better than this epitaph and if the research on such a fertile period
for classical studies must always remain within the known paths or may
look for less explored ones.

Although the differences between Murray and the Ritualists have been
emphasized, less covered are their points of convergence, especially
where they neglect  anthropological ideology in favour of the structure
of the text. For example, in Murray's Excursus on the Ritual Forms
preserved in Greek Tragedy--which is an organic part of Harrison's
Themis (1912) a sort of manifesto of the Ritualist experience -- the
genetic question on tragedy resolves itself in the individuation of the
constitutive elements of the narration, organized in a uniform
sequence. The analogy with Russian formalism, in the double aspect of
synchronic morphology and diachronic genetics, is all the more
surprising if one considers that Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale
and The Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale would appear only later,
respectively in 1928 and 1946, and both Murray and Propp reach a
schematization of the internal dynamics of the agrarian festivals,
departing from the assumption that tragedy and folk tale 'narrate' what
'was previously acted' exactly in the same order as it was acted.

The possibility of real interconnecting routes between the
proto-structural experiences of Oxbridge and the Russian critical
literary currents, despite their seemingly mutual ignorance of each
other, deserves further study  (the philologist Nicholas Bakhtin,
brother of the more famous Mikhail, was one of the persons closest to
Cornford in the last years of his life).  Other significant names and
indications of possible contacts with the formalism are cited in P. G.
Naidicht, A Ritualist Odyssey: Victorian England to Soviet Russia,  in
The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, ed. William M. Calder III,
Illinois Classical Studies, Supplement 2, Atlanta 1991, although from a
different perspective from the one I am suggesting. For in my view in
the slipping of anthropological comparativism towards the morphology of
the text lies one of the most vital legacies that the study of classics
during the first half of the 20th century has left to us.