I keep seeing those Mary Renault Greek novels around and mentally earmarking them for a time when I can finally have a holiday outside my own house. Have you read any of the others that you’d recommend?
Sure, could be a thread on its own I guess [and so I have split it], and my opinion is obviously idiomatic but I would say.
- The mask of Apollo
- The Praise Singer
- The Last of the Wine
Are the most historically authentic for what that is worth, I like them all, though these are her least famous.
Then there is the Theseus series:
- The King Must Die
- The Bull from the Sea
Basically a fictionized retelling heavily influenced by the Golden Bough. Not sure how it will sit with moderns.
Her Alexander the Great series:
- Fire from Heaven
- The Persian Boy
- Funeral Games
is interesting. I have noticed old people seem to like them. It is an incredibly sympathetic retelling of Alex’s life, also very naïve. In my humble opinion they get progressively less readable.
And in fact, my grandmother recommended them many years ago to me.
Thanks, that’s really helpful for plotting a path through them. I’ve had a copy of Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles sitting on my bookshelf looking unloved for a few years too, so I’ll have to make a project of it. The only one of these modern reimaginings of Greek stuff I’ve managed to read was Valerio Manfredi’s Il Mio Nome È Nessuno (i.e. οὖτις ἐμοί γ᾽ ὄνομα) - I won’t be reading it again in this life (nor, deo volente, the next).
I rather liked the Simonides one (The Praise Singer?). Other than that I’ve only read (the first part of?) The King Must Die, with its all-blonde Greeks. I read that in my early teens I think, and had some unlearning to do. Only considerably later did I recognize it as Frazer-influenced. And I didn’t then realize she was lesbian. Is that why they’re still read perhaps? But they are well written, and well imagined—which only makes them more pernicious?
Strait is the gate - but don’t you think novels like these set a few more down the way to real Greeks than would otherwise take an interest? Or do people who would otherwise make good Greek scholars get stuck in the bog of their easy pleasures?
Mary Renault was from Essex, I believe.
Haha perfect. 
It feels mean to point that out but I really have noticed that pattern. 9/10 someone recommending them is old.
Yes, I chose not to comment on this. It is throughout the Praise Singer too (real Greeks are blond, Simonides being dark is a minor plot point), which is risible. It is a good reminder of how shaky the command of Greek, how truly unfamiliar, that generation of classics fanciers were. I don’t find them pernicious, just old. Some of hers are well written
Sean, this article is more eloquent and kinder to Miller’s work than I could be: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/books/review/the-song-of-achilles-by-madeline-miller.html
“The result is a book that has the head of a young adult novel, the body of the “Iliad” and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland.” - Ha! Maybe it should stay on the shelf, then.
I loved that acid Renault quote in the review:
“If characters have come to life, one should know how they will make love; if not it doesn’t matter. Inch-by-inch physical descriptions are the ketchup of the literary cuisine, only required by the insipid dish or by the diner without a palate.”
For me The Last of the Wine is her best. Interestingly her first, too.
I also like her version of the assassination of Hipparchus in The Praise Singer.
The Alexander Trilogy is, in my opinion, rather uneven. The Persian Boy is the best of the three volumes.
The Golden Bough imagery of Bull From The Sea makes it a bit unwieldy.
But, that said, all her books are worth reading.
Not to take anything away from Mary Renault’s influence, but it was the movie Hercules with Steve Reeves that first awakened my interest in Greek mythology. As an 8 year old seeing that film, it was a mind blowing experience. For years the scene in which he wrestled with the Cretan bull replayed itself in my imagination.
Interestingly, I managed to re-watch it a couple of years ago and hardly anything on the screen matched my memory of it. The bull wrestling scene is so obviously a fake that I have wondered how it had such an impact on me.