Oswyn Murray

Oswyn Murray (born 26 March 1937) 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 (born 1961), the glaciologist Tavi Murray (born 1965), Alexander Edmund Murray (born 1976), Malcolm Patrick Murray (born 1980), and Rosamund Jean Murray (born 1982).

Selected publications Sympotica: A symposium on the symposion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. (Ed.) Early Greece. Harvard University Press, 1993 (2nd edition). The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present. Allen Lane, 2024.