2023/148: The Last of the Wine — Mary Renault

It was not that we were in love with the past. We were of an age to feel the present our own, and to suppose it would never outstrip us. [loc. 4289]

Read for book club: technically a reread, but it's at least twenty years (and probably more than thirty) since I first read this novel. Curiously, the one image that I remembered from that earlier reread is the narrator's father, Myron, turning a wine bowl in his hands: 'inscribed on the one side MYRON and on the other ALKIBIADES'. For The Last of the Wine is about (among other things) the Peloponnesian War, and Alkibiades' chequered career, and the Tyranny of the Thirty. The focus, though, is on the narrator Alexias: his adolescence, his many admirers, his education at the feet of Socrates, his love affair with Lysis, his difficult relationship with his father, and his experience of war.

This novel caused quite a storm in 1956: it's not sexually explicit, but it does deal with a homosexual relationship between a youth and an older man, and the way that relationship evolves when Lysis -- not only Alexias' lover but his mentor and role model -- marries a woman named Thalia. (After Lysis' death, Alexias, who has already saved Thalia from dishonour for Lysis' sake, marries her himself.) Renault's depiction of their relationship is understated but powerful, not least because in a hundred little details she shows us that this is wholly normal and expected in that place and time. Though a man must marry and father children, his first love affair as a youth will be with a man a few years older than himself: and, as with Myron and his long-past relationship with Alkibiades, that first love can influence and shape a man's whole life. Alexias doesn't always understand what he's seeing (for instance his father buying at auction one of Alkibiades' old mantles: 'I daresay my father thought it a bad bargain, for he never wore it') but the shadow of Alkibiades looms large in Myron's household.

Where this novel really hit home for me was the depiction of Athens' defeat by Sparta: widespread starvation and infanticide, surrender, and then the almost Orwellian Tyranny of the Thirty, which lasted mere months but saw 'the killing of 5% of the Athenian population, the confiscation of citizens' property and the exile of other democratic supporters... Many wealthy citizens were executed simply so the oligarchs could confiscate their assets, which were then distributed among the Thirty and their supporters.' (source. Renault doesn't pull her punches: Alexias suffers loss after loss, and it is he who kills the leader of the tyrants, avenging his father.

Ancient Greece is so vividly evoked: I felt as though every stele Alexias saw, every temple he prayed at, was real -- and likely many of them were, for Renault had an excellent and comprehensive knowledge of the archaeology and history of classical Greece. There are references, too, to the Athenians' own sense of history: one man has pierced ears and Alexias deduces that 'he came from one of the very old noble families, some of whom at that time still wore the ancient adornments handed down since the Wars of Troy'. (Lysis, at his wedding, wears 'a great brooch of antique goldwork from Mycenae, a gift to some ancestor from Agamemnon'.) That's a primarily oral history stretching back nearly a thousand years... There are some less pleasant, but wholly accurate, elements: the treatment of women, the custom of exposing female newborns, the enslavement of defeated soldiers, the slaughter of domestic animals in times of famine. It is a very different world: but the people in it are not that different from ourselves.

I've read another very good historical novel dealing with the rise and fall of Alkibiades: The Flowers of Adonis, by Rosemary Sutcliff. (And I note from that review that I had just completed an online course in Ancient Greek history, of which I now remember nothing. But perhaps the basics are still with me, even though I'd forgotten about the course.)