Oswyn Murray

Oswyn Murray is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford University, and a distinguished classical scholar.
Murray is joint editor with John Boardman and Jasper Griffin of the Oxford History of the Classical World.
Boris Johnson was one of his students when he was reading Classics at Balliol College. He describes Johnson as "a buffoon and an idler". In 2018, when Johnson became prime minister, Murray sent his former student, in the ancient tradition, a renuntiatio amicitiae, a public revocation of their friendship.

Family

Oswyn Murray is a great-grandson of the famous Scottish lexicographer James Augustus Henry Murray. He is the son of the civil servant Malcolm Patrick Murray. He married Jenny E. Clay in Oxford in 1959. He married Penelope A. Singleton in Banbury in 1976. He has five children: James A. H. Murray, the glaciologist Tavi Murray, Alexander Edmund Murray, Malcolm Patrick Murray, and Rosamund Jean Murray.

Selected publications

Sympotica: A symposium on the symposion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Early Greece. Harvard University Press, 1993.
The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present. Allen Lane, 2024.