Oswyn Murray’s book The Muse of History is subtitled ‘The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present’, but this period of some three centuries represents virtually the whole of the modern historiography of Greece. The primary reason for this is one that is easily forgotten today: from the medieval to the early modern period, Greek civilisation, with its literature and art, was mainly understood from a Roman perspective. Even the gods were known by their adopted Latin names, and in an age when everyone who went to school could read and write Latin, a relatively small number were ever fluent in Greek.

The canon of Greek literature had been printed in the original very early, from the late fifteenth century onwards, and the most popular works were translated into Latin or indeed accompanied by Latin parallel texts; but far fewer were rendered into the vernacular tongues. Homer was translated into English by George Chapman from 1598, and may have been read by Shakespeare; he certainly knew the English version of Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Thomas North (from 1580) from the French of Jacques Amyot (1559-65). Thucydides was translated by Thomas Hobbes in 1628. Surprisingly, the great Greek tragedians were barely available in English at all until Robert Potter’s editions from 1777.