Oswyn Murray

• 1. Introduction

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  Oswyn Murray was born on the 26th of March 1937, and he has spent his scholarly life at Balliol College, Oxford, one of the oldest and most storied colleges in the English-speaking world. But it is not only his work on ancient Greece that makes him a figure worth knowing. Among the students who sat in his tutorials reading Classics was a young man named Boris Johnson. Murray remembers him as "a buffoon and an idler." When that same student became prime minister in 2018, Murray did something that most people today would find baffling. He sent him a renuntiatio amicitiae. That Latin phrase names a practice from the ancient world: a formal, public revocation of friendship. What kind of man reaches for a Roman legal custom to settle a personal score? And what does that tell us about how deeply the ancient world lives inside the people who study it? This documentary follows Murray from his family origins through his scholarship to the act that made him briefly famous outside academic walls.

• 2. A Family of Words

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  James Augustus Henry Murray, the great Scottish lexicographer and the original editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was Oswyn Murray's great-grandfather. That inheritance is not merely biographical decoration. To descend from the man who spent decades cataloguing the entire English language is to carry a particular kind of seriousness about what words mean and where they come from. Oswyn's father, Malcolm Patrick Murray, worked as a civil servant, a life built on the prose of governance rather than the poetry of scholarship. Oswyn moved in a different direction. He settled at Oxford, where he became a Fellow of Balliol College. His own family grew to five children. Among them is Tavi Murray, born in 1965, who became a glaciologist, a scientist who reads the slow language of ice much as her father reads the slow language of antiquity. James A. H. Murray, born in 1961, carries the name of the great lexicographer forward into another generation.

• 3. The Oxford History Project

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  John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray share the editorial duties on the Oxford History of the Classical World, one of the major collaborative surveys of Greek and Roman civilization produced by Oxford University Press. Editing a work of that scope requires a scholar who can hold the entire arc of classical antiquity in mind while also policing the details of individual chapters. Murray's role as joint editor places him alongside two other leading figures in classical studies and reflects the kind of institutional trust that Balliol and Oxford place in their long-serving fellows. His own monograph Early Greece, published by Harvard University Press, reached a second edition in 1993, a sign that it remained useful to students and researchers across more than a single generation. The volume Symposia, which he edited and which Oxford University Press published in 1990, gathered essays on the ancient Greek drinking party, the symposion, a social institution that Murray has treated as a key to understanding Greek culture from the inside.

• 4. The Symposion as a Window

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  Symposia, published in 1990, is a collection that treats the ancient Greek drinking party not as a footnote to political history but as a subject in its own right. The symposion was the institution through which Greek aristocratic men formed alliances, recited poetry, argued philosophy, and exercised social power. Murray's scholarly interest in it reflects a conviction that the texture of daily life tells us things about a civilization that its wars and constitutions cannot. His most recent book, The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present, was published by Allen Lane in 2024. That title signals a different kind of argument: not just what the ancient Greeks did, but how modern thinkers from the Enlightenment onward have interpreted, appropriated, and sometimes distorted the Greek past. It is the work of a scholar who has spent a long career thinking about what antiquity means to people who are not ancient.

• 5. The Letter Johnson Received

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  When Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2018, his former tutor at Balliol did not send congratulations. Murray sent a renuntiatio amicitiae, a deliberate echo of a Roman practice by which one party formally and publicly dissolved a bond of friendship. The gesture was pointed in two directions at once. It was a personal judgment on Johnson, the student Murray had once described as a buffoon and an idler. It was also a demonstration of something Murray had spent his career arguing: that the ancient world is not a set of dead metaphors but a living vocabulary of human conduct. A Roman senator who wished to signal his moral distance from a colleague did not simply stop returning letters. He made the severance a matter of public record, with a name and a procedure. Murray, the great-grandson of the man who catalogued English words, reached past the English language entirely and found a Latin formula that said precisely what he meant. The Muse of History, published six years after that letter, extends the same argument to a much larger canvas.