Turning away from the Enlightenment conception of Greek myth as a reflection of a universal religion in its infancy, Müller placed the study squarely as the outcome of an encounter between the particular character of a people and a specific historical setting,[4] where, in the broadest sense it has remained, though his convictions that the core of each culture is uniquely its own led him to deny the influence of Egyptian art on Greek art,[5] already being recognised at the time.

Müller's position at Göttingen was made difficult by the political troubles which followed the accession of Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover, in 1837, and he applied for permission to travel, leaving Germany in 1839.

[2] Undoubtedly he wished to concentrate the results of his whole life of scholarly activity in his magnum opus, Geschichten hellenischen Stämme und Städte.

[3] His Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825), in which he avoided the views of G. F. Creuzer and Christian August Lobeck, prepared the way for the scientific investigation of myths.

[3] Working without the benefit of modern understanding of psychology, he offered steps towards the "internal idea" of myth and presented techniques for determining the age of a mythus from the mentions of it in literary sources and a notable chapter on how to separate the mythus from the modifications of poets and prose writers, and examined the relations that Homer and Hesiod bore to their traditions, all of this before the supportive contributions of modern archaeology, philological analysis, or the understanding of oral transmission of myth, a remarkable achievement.

by Welcker, 1848; English translation by J. Leitch, London, 1847) and Denkmäler der alten Kunst (1832), which he wrote in association with Carl Oesterley.

In the last years of his life, he undertook to prepare for the English Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a history of Greek literature, which in 1841 appeared posthumously as Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur bis auf das Zeitalter Alexanders (4th edition, revised and continued by Heitz, 1882–84).