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Daisy Dunn on Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine, SF Issue 73

A Classical Mosaic

Alexias was an unwanted child. When he was born, a month prema­ture, his father took one look at his small, fragile frame and decided that he was the product of an inauspicious age and that it would be kinder to all concerned if he were killed at once. Preparations were being made to abandon him to the elements when, quite unexpect­edly, news came of another death in the family.

In 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the plague had begun to sweep Athens ‘like fire in old heather’. Several months on, it showed no sign of abating. Alexias’ grandfather had succumbed, and now his uncle, just 23 years old, lay lifeless on the floor. He had gone to visit his lover and had found him on the verge of death in the fountain where he had been bathing to relieve his fever. Bereft, and convinced that he, too, was stricken, the uncle took hemlock. As he lay dying, he traced in wine with his finger the name of his beloved: PHILON.

The Last of the Wine (1956) is the most affecting and profound of Mary Renault’s historical novels. I first read it when I was taking a course in Greek vase painting as a student at Oxford, where Eileen Mary Challans (as Renault was off the page) had studied in the mid-1920s. I was struck by how sensitively she wrote about love between men at a time when homosexuality was seldom discussed. I couldn’t help feeling that Renault, herself a lesbian, empathized most with those Greeks who were forced into marriage against the pull of their own hearts.

At the time I was researching a beautiful terracotta cup, made about seventy years before the Peloponnesian War erupted. It had at its centre a painting of Achilles bandaging the arm of his comrade Patroclus, both characters familiar from Homer’s Iliad. As I looked at the details in the paintwork – the flash of whit

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Alexias was an unwanted child. When he was born, a month prema­ture, his father took one look at his small, fragile frame and decided that he was the product of an inauspicious age and that it would be kinder to all concerned if he were killed at once. Preparations were being made to abandon him to the elements when, quite unexpect­edly, news came of another death in the family.

In 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the plague had begun to sweep Athens ‘like fire in old heather’. Several months on, it showed no sign of abating. Alexias’ grandfather had succumbed, and now his uncle, just 23 years old, lay lifeless on the floor. He had gone to visit his lover and had found him on the verge of death in the fountain where he had been bathing to relieve his fever. Bereft, and convinced that he, too, was stricken, the uncle took hemlock. As he lay dying, he traced in wine with his finger the name of his beloved: PHILON. The Last of the Wine (1956) is the most affecting and profound of Mary Renault’s historical novels. I first read it when I was taking a course in Greek vase painting as a student at Oxford, where Eileen Mary Challans (as Renault was off the page) had studied in the mid-1920s. I was struck by how sensitively she wrote about love between men at a time when homosexuality was seldom discussed. I couldn’t help feeling that Renault, herself a lesbian, empathized most with those Greeks who were forced into marriage against the pull of their own hearts. At the time I was researching a beautiful terracotta cup, made about seventy years before the Peloponnesian War erupted. It had at its centre a painting of Achilles bandaging the arm of his comrade Patroclus, both characters familiar from Homer’s Iliad. As I looked at the details in the paintwork – the flash of white as Patroclus bares his teeth, the tension in his foot as he struggles to hold still – I had the distinct impression that Mary Renault had been here before me. The image, you see, recurs in her novel, only in a slightly altered form. Alexias, granted life after his mother dies from complications of labour, grows up and falls in love with a slightly older youth named Lysis. When Alexias cuts his foot, Lysis cleans the wound in the sea and then offers to carry him over the sand. Alexias, who narrates the story, savours the moment:
I leaned back for him to take hold of me, and fastened my arms round his neck. But he did not carry me; nor did I let him go.
Echoing Achilles in the painting, Lysis eventually kneels down to tend to the cut, even pressing his lips against it to stem the bleeding. Alexias recovers. Like the classical vase painter, Renault clearly saw Achilles and Patroclus as more than just friends, despite Homer never having made a relationship between them explicit. She was equally inspired by reports that Socrates, a minor character in her novel, came to the aid of the Greek general Alcibiades when he was injured in the Peloponnesian War and that the two men were lovers. This rich and rather complex layering of ideas was characteristic of Renault, who was never so heavy-handed as to allude to every paint­ing and poem and history book she used within her narrative. She made a mosaic of little bits from here, little bits from there, and held them together with an invisible grout. Classicists love her books because they recognize the sources from which she has taken her material and they take pleasure in unpicking how she used them. But while they may know the history of the Peloponnesian War inside out from Thucydides, who charted the decline of Athens over the course of the thirty-year conflict, the human cost of that war is better understood through fiction. Renault does not spare her readers the mess and bloodiness of war. She describes sinews tearing, bones grating, last breaths whistling in the throats of the dying. Most poignantly of all she describes the effects these sounds have upon those left standing. Alexias is violently sick when he slays a man. He is, as Renault often reminds us, little more than a teenager. As he leaves for battle, he bids farewell to his new stepmother, just eight years his senior, and catches sight of the soldier he is to become:
There was a silver mirror on the wall behind her; as I moved, I saw a man reflected in it. I turned round startled, to see what man had come into the women’s rooms. Then I saw that the man was I.
His stepmother’s reaction to his joining the campaign is somewhat different. ‘Oh, no,’ she says before he can correct her, ‘you are still a boy.’ In ancient Greece, affairs between young men – and older men and boys – were deemed beneficial for emotional and intellectual development. The city-state of Thebes even had an elite infantry sec­tion formed of 150 pairs of male lovers known as the Sacred Band. The idea that an older man could inure a younger man to the realities of war through love as well as through experience appealed to Renault, who depicted Lysis as a mentor as much as a partner. The Last of the Wine is, at heart, a coming-of-age story in which Alexias learns to leave behind his difficult childhood and become a better man than his father. Alexias’ family live in the Inner Kerameikos, a suburb of Athens popular with potters, in a house with a courtyard, a fig tree and a colonnade of painted columns, and they own at least two horses – a sign that they are fairly well-to-do. Life should be idyllic. And yet Alexias grows up with a brute, who has him raised by his concubine, a woman so cruel that she wrings the neck of his kitten. Only the arrival of Arete, the stepmother, offers Alexias some reprieve. By con­trast, the war, despite its horror, offers an opportunity to escape. I have been reading Mary Renault again recently while writing a book on Oxford between the wars. Sitting down with The Last of the Wine and a couple of Renault’s other novels set in ancient Greece – The King Must Die (1958), on the feats of the hero Theseus, and Fire from Heaven (1969), on the young Alexander the Great – I was again enchanted by the poise of Renault’s prose and the emotional depth of her characters. Alexias, especially, emerges as only too human, riven by jealousy when Lysis reveals that he has met a girl, and by disgust at his suggestion that he, too, might like to get an early taste of what marriage is like: The truth was that his encouragement had rather missed its mark, reminding me that it would be he, in the natural course of things, who would get married first. People I knew seemed to take this lightly enough; I had seen them acting groomsman to their friends with perfect cheerfulness; it distressed me to think myself more given to extremes, and less capable of reason, than other men. Indeed, when I look back, I cannot under­stand myself at this time of my life. Defying what remained ‘the natural course of things’ in the 1930s, Mary Renault found a life partner in Julie Mullard while training to be a nurse at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary. Her first few books were writ­ten between nursing shifts. In 1948, the two women moved to South Africa, where they found a new freedom. It was, as Alexias might have said, like fleeing the flames for a life of thrilling uncertainty.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 73 © Daisy Dunn 2022


About the contributor

Daisy Dunn is the author of five classical books and has made a foray into the twentieth century with her sixth, Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars, published this March. You can hear her discussing the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans in our podcast, Episode 28, ‘An Odyssey through the Classics’.

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