The Last of the Wine

"Mary Renault became best known for writing books set in ancient Greece. This was her first one, before this she was writing contemporary fiction. This was her breakthrough. And it’s easy to see why—even though she wrote many, many excellent books set in the Classical era, this is my favourite. It’s a story of Athens in the Golden Age. It takes in everything from the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War, which Athens is about to lose. You have the Sicilian expedition, you have the fall of democracy, the trial of Socrates . All of these pivotal moments of Athenian history are captured. Yet it’s also a very personal narrative. It blends the personal and the grand narrative quite seamlessly. We follow Alexias, this wealthy Athenian. We see his coming of age in Athens during a period of turmoil. He falls in love with Lysis, an older man, and we chart their relationship. Socrates is an important figure in the novel. It’s very well-researched, lyrical, vivid, and quite beautiful. Who knows what it was really like to live then, but Renault creates a vivid almost cinematic reading experience of 5th-century Athens. It’s one of the best books I’ve read about that period. Strange as it may seem considering that think that The Last of the Wine is a brilliant book, and is one to which I return, in Glorious Exploits , I almost wanted to do the opposite: I wanted to take a character who is not privileged, who doesn’t appear in the greatest hits of history or know important people, to approach it from the outside."

"It’s beautifully written. It was recommended to me by a friend some years ago, and so I feel very sentimental about it. It’s also beautifully researched. If you want an example of a fiction writer who is deeply, deeply immersed in ancient literature and understands it very, very intimately, then this is a great book to go to. Some people might suggest that its depiction of same sex relations is maybe a little old-fashioned, even sentimental. But I think it’s just a wonderful read, and it’s a wonderful introduction to the ancient world in some beautifully written prose. The love affair is between Lysis and Alexias. They’re studying philosophy. The background to all of this is the question of how far philosophy and same sex desire interact in the ancient world. Strangely, there is a suggestion in many of Plato’s works that he seems to understand desire only through the lens of homosexual desire. He doesn’t really talk about heterosexual desire in his works, and he talks an awful lot about desire. So there’s always been that question of what a love affair in those times might have looked like, and there’s a sentimentalism at the heart of all of that."