Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75762 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 380 pages

Synopsis
"The Persian Boy" tells the story of the climactic last seven years of Alexander the Great's life through the eyes of his lover, Bagoas. Abducted and gelded as a boy, Bagoas was sold as a courtesan to King Darius of Persia, but found freedom with Alexander after the Macedon army conquered his homeland. Taken as an attendant into Alexander's household, the beautiful young eunuch becomes the great general's lover and their relationship sustains Alexander as he survives assassination plots, the demands of two foreign wives, a mutinous army, and his own ferocious temper.

About the Author
Mary Renault was educated at Clifton High School, Bristol and St Hugh's College, Oxford. Having completed nursing training in 1937 she wrote her first novel Promise of Love: her next three novels were written during off-time duty whilst serving in the war. In 1948 she went to live in South Africa but travelled widely. It was her trip to Greece and her visits to Corinth, Samos, Crete, Delos, Aeginia and other islands, as well as to Athens, Sounion and Marathon, that resulted in her brilliant historical reconstructions of Ancient Greece. Mary Renault died in 1983.

Customer Reviews

Personal, touching and emotive
A fantastic read. Renault vividly charts the later years of Alexander's life and his many achievements, adding a personal angle (and in many ways making the story more believable and touching) by telling it all through the eyes of Bagoas, a Persian Eunuch.


I found this book both Historically educational and enjoyable. Accessible to everybody and well worth a read!

Best of the three
The selection for the main character is brilliant. The reader feels very close to the events and the magic of Alexander can be felt through the pages. Despite the other parts of the trilogy not being as good as this masterpiece, together a brilliant trilogy is created.

Romantic view of Alexander's last years
Renault's Alexander is one of the most complex and haunting fictional characters, and this book (the 2nd of the trilogy which began with Fire from Heaven and continues with Funeral Games)is probably the most accessible. It follows Alexander's last years of conquest in Persia and the East, and is told by Bagoas, the Persian eunuch who once served Darius, King of Kings, and so is won by Alexander along with the rest of Darius' kingdom and personal possessions.
The love that grows between Alexander and his 'Persian boy' is romaticised and stops just short of tipping over into Mills & Boon territory, but is effectively offset both by the parallel relationship with Hephaistion, and the military conquest of the East, the hardship and the conflicts that it engenders amongst the native Macedonians who have been away from home for over 10 years.
Renault does a fabulous job of integrating the ancient sources while never letting them inhibit her imagination in the slightest, and 'her' Alexander has been hugely influential in the way that he is received and understood today. Not that I'm claiming that this is great history - it's not and isn't supposed to be. But it is great fiction.