... a show put up by some Etruscans from up north. ... their faces were quite bare; they were using them to act with. It is hard to describe how this display affected me. Some barbarian peoples are ashamed to show their bodies, while civilised men take pride in making theirs fit to be seen. But to strip one’s own face to the crowd, as if it were all happening to oneself instead of to Oedipus or Priam; one would need a front of brass to bear it. [loc. 1579]
I believe this is technically a reread: I certainly owned a copy of this novel in my early teens. But nothing felt at all familiar, and it's possible I found it too difficult back then.
The narrator is Nikeratos (Niko), an Athenian actor, and the time is around 350BCE. Niko is noticed by Dion, advisor to the tyrant Dionysios I of Syracuse. ('Tyrant' in the original sense: a ruler who holds power without any constitutional right.) After Dionysios' death, Niko becomes a witness to Dion and Plato's efforts to mould the dead king's son, Dionysios II, into the platonic ideal of a ruler. It does not end well.
I found the political plot less engaging than the theatrical scenes. Niko has an antique mask of Apollo, made of olive wood, which seems to speak to him and guide him. He is a successful actor (and sometimes also a courier for Dion and his allies): passionate about his craft, appalled by Plato's ideas about reforming the theatre ('the parts of base, or passionate, or unstable men should be related in narration' [loc. 2547]), and dedicated to Apollo, whose mask he wears and whose role he plays at three key moments in the novel. One is during the (or 'a') sack of Syracuse, which Renault describes with understated horror: 'It took them a good while to go through the temple. After a time, we heard the wails of the women left alive, being dragged off to Ortygia. The child screamed on one note until, I suppose, it died.' [loc. 4584] In that scene, Niko uses the theatre's special effects -- a sounding-board with particular qualities, the thunder machine -- to strike the fear of Apollo into the invaders.
Many of the plays Niko performs in, or mentions, have been lost to us. I was especially struck by the use of Aeschylus' The Myrmidons as a cultural marker: "Lovers meet at it, as if it were a shrine like that tomb in Thebes," muses Niko, realising that Dion and Plato had been lovers. Renault slyly slips in a reference to Hamlet: 'I dreamed I was beside some tomb or grave, holding a skull in my hand. It was clean, and I knew this was a play. Some flashes still come back to me; I was the son of a murdered king whose shade had cried me to avenge him...' [loc. 2146].
And the final page has Niko reflecting on how 'All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? ... No one will ever make a tragedy – and that is as well, for one could not bear it – whose grief is that the principals never met." Renault has written that tragedy, and made it clear that Plato was wasted on Dionysios II, and Aristotle inadequate for the young Alexander (whom Niko meets). Someday soon I'll need to (re?)read the Alexander trilogy...
Renault's afterword, which sets out her sources and provides some context for the lost plays she mentions, also includes this comment: "No true parallel exists between this passage in Syracusan history and the affairs of any present-day state. Christianity and Islam have changed irrevocably the moral reflexes of the world." And yet it's easy to see partial parallels, of corruption and nepotism, fascism and oligarchy, dictatorship and tyranny.
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