Product Description

Alexias, a young Athenian of good family, grows up just as the Peloponnesian War is drawing to a close. The adult world he enters is one in which the power and influence of his class have been undermined by the forces of war, and more and more Alexias finds himself drawn to the controversial teachings of Sokrates. Among the great thinker's followers Alexias meets Lysis, and the two youths become inseparable, wrestling together in the palaestra, journeying to the Olympic Games and fighting in the wars against Sparta. On the great historical canvas of famine, siege, and civil conflict, their relationship captures vividly the intricacies of classical Greek culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112585 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 356 pages

Synopsis
Alexias, a young Athenian of good family, grows up just as the Peloponnesian War is drawing to a close. The adult world he enters is one in which the power and influence of his class have been undermined by the forces of war, and more and more Alexias finds himself drawn to the controversial teachings of Sokrates. Among the great thinker's followers Alexias meets Lysis, and the two youths become inseparable, wrestling together in the palaestra, journeying to the Olympic Games and fighting in the wars against Sparta. On the great historical canvas of famine, siege, and civil conflict, their relationship captures vividly the intricacies of classical Greek culture.

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 then 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, Aegina 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

Among my most valuable reading ever.
I came across this paperback when I was 15 and keep it still, 45 years later. It has to be possibly the most informative and thought-provoking work I've ever come across. Among the everyday lifes of Greeks of the 5th Cent. BCE, we are led little by little into Sokratic analytical reasoning - the man as he must surely have been. I genuinely believe it made me the person I became, cautious over whom to trust and distrust (those disinclined to discuss basic ideas) and led me on to the translation, then the original, of the stunning Apology (=Trial speech) of Sokrates, as written by Plato. Shallow thinking, buzz-words and barnstorming are dismissed for the superficial platitudes they are - and all this against probably the most disastrous, 27 year long, war of the centuries BCE. We don't reach Sokrates' trial in the book, but a metaphorical foreshadowing of it at the very close, as indicated in the title. This I would recommend to anyone - and to the paperback translation of the Apology afterwards. The Apology has simply no work in my life to match it. In difficult times, I don't think I'd have kept my balance without these two books in mind, and what - and how - they taught me. Five stars aren't enough.

Read it, all aspiring historical novelists, and take note
In the slew of wordier, more hyped fiction about the classical world that is engulfing us at the moment, I hope some readers are prompted to go back to Mary Renault. Her books are an object lesson in what you can leave out. It's not about research, it's not about pages of painstaking archaeological description leavened by sword-slashing and peplum-ripping, it's about the kind of imaginitive immersion in an ancient culture that can enable the author to present it in its own terms, without explication, but so that the perennial dilemmas of the soul that were present then as now leap across to the modern reader, defamiliarised and sharpened by their alien setting.
The Last of the Wine is about Athens in the time of Socrates, but is above all an Oedipal tragedy of the starkness that you would expect in a culture where fathers had the power of life and death over their children. Alexias finds out that his father never meant him to survive and this knowledge blights their relationship and his whole life, successful and adventurous though it is on the surface. In a bitterly poignant moment, when the father lies dying, he tries to ask forgiveness but Alexias thinks he only wants to be told all over again that he was right; it is symptomatic of how Alexias, unlike his lover Lysis, is too emotionally scarred to escape from the conventions of his doomed society - but Lysis dies (as does Socrates), and Alexias survives, bereft, disillusioned, revealing much more as a narrator than he has understood himself.

For the combination of page-turning narrative brilliance with psychological insight, no one rivals Mary Renault. Read it, read all her other books on ancient Greece, The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo, the Alexander trilogy, The Praise Singer. Mouth-watering, stomach-filling writing, the kind of meal one remembers years later.

The human side of Thucydides
Renault takes Thucydides' magisterial account of the Peloponnesian War, the deadly conflict between Athens and Sparta in the second half of the 5th century bc, and shows us what it meant to the ordinary people growing up and coming of age in the middle of the war that lasted over 30 years and broke the power of classical Athens.
Her 'heroes' are young men who study under Socrates, fight against the Spartans and witness the struggles of Alcibiades and Lysander.
If you've read Thucydides, this is a wonderful fictional complement, and if you haven't then if this doesn't make you want to, nothing will!
Steeped in the cruelty, violence and beauty of ancient Greece, this is a beautifully written and subtle novel that really whisks you back 2,500 years so that you can experience the texture of life then for yourself. Brilliant.