Homosexuality and Heroism
Some comments on The Last of the Wine, a novel of Ancient Greece by Mary
Renault, and a personal memoir of the novelist.
This was delivered as the key-note lecture, in an abbreviated form, by Professor Roy
Sargeant, as the Aiden Rogers Memorial Lecture at the Symposium, International
Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, at Trinity College, Dublin on Sunday 10 May 2008.
In its abbreviated form it was delivered by Professor Sargeant at the University of
Johannesburg, Con Cowan Theatre, on Monday 07 May 2012 during the run of Juliet
Jenkin’s play Mary and the Conqueror.
I am not a Classicist. I have no Greek and little Latin, but I would claim to be wellread through translation into the world of Ancient Greece. I would like to
acknowledge the origin of the title of my lecture. It is the title used by Professor
Nikolai Endres for a section in a monograph he wrote on Mary Renault. Professor
Endres is Associate Professor of World Literature, Department of English, Western
Kentucky University in the United States.
While some of her more flighty and overheated gay fans believed she was a reincarnation of an Ancient Greek warrior, Mary Renault’s editor at Longmans, John
Guest, did refer, more soberly, to her “psychic vision of life in Ancient Greece”.1
Mary Renault (note the Anglicized pronunciation she used) chose the name of the
hero in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d as a pseudonym to disguise her activities as a
novelist from the British hospital authorities. She was training as a nurse before the
Second World War when her first novel was published. She had been born Mary
Challans in London in 1905. She would die in 1983 in Cape Town, South Africa.
In 1948 Renault won a prize worth £37 000 from MGM for her romantic,
contemporary novel, Return To Night. Bleak post-war Britain was an unprepossessing
prospect. At breakfast one Sunday morning with her lover and lifelong companion,
Julie Mullard reading The Sunday Times and Mary reading the Sunday Observer, one
asked the other “Shall we go to South Africa?” Whether they took advantage of the
£10 passages being offered at that time I cannot say. However, they shipped up in
Durban and then later they settled in Cape Town in the seaside suburb of Camps Bay
where they bought a wooden cottage right next to the sea at Glen Beach. They named
the cottage Delos. A sign of Renault’s lifelong devotion to the god Apollo.
I met this fascinating couple as a young broadcaster in 1964. I enjoyed a long and
deeply enriching friendship with them until Mullard’s death in 2006.
Some of Renault’s flighty and overheated gay fans were shocked after reading the
first gay novel, The Charioteer, and then the first novel set in Ancient Greece, The
Last of the Wine, that Renault was a woman. `Surely she must be one of us?’ you
could imagine they shrieked, `Ah, but she’s lesbian, suppose that’ll do.’
1
Sweetman, David, Mary Renault A Biography, Chatto & Windus, 1993, (156).
1
Heroes and heroism. It is of these as imagined by Renault in her novel The Last of the
Wine that I wish to speak.
Interviewing her in 1967 for the book review programme on the SABC English
Service, Bookshelf, which I edited and produced, I asked how she had come to the
Greeks. Her reply was simple and logical, a mark of her thinking, `Well,’ she said, `I
was interested in writing about homosexuality in a permissive society after writing
about it in a non-permissive society.’ The Charioteer (published 1953) set in the time
of the Second World War in England had preceded The Last of the Wine (published
1956) by three years.
It is almost unthinkable to recall now those dreadful years of the 1950s in England
and the 1960s in South Africa. In 1968 the Nationalist apartheid government run by
Calvinists determined some draconian anti-gay legislation and this brought to the
Immorality Act (Amendment) Commission a stern letter from Renault. The worst
aspects of the planned new legislation were scrapped. Renault played her part in
allowing some sanity to prevail.
But those were years of dread for homosexuals where the strong arm of the law,
manipulated by the police to keep their rates of arrests and successful convictions up,
would deal imprisonment and the devastating loss of reputation to those who fell foul
of it. Peter Wildeblood puts it this way in his agonising book, Against the Law, “A
policeman whose score is lagging…can always catch up by going to the nearest
public lavatory…As one man said to me in prison: `Why should they climb a tree to
catch a burglar when the can pick up people of our sort like apples off the ground’.”2
In England the roll call of Beaulieu, Wildeblood, Pitt-Rivers (sounds like a list of
Richard 111’s luckless victims, doesn’t it?) and Gielgud would resound, and further
back the name of that `trendsetter of all trendsetters’ in such matters, a brilliant
student of Trinity College, Dublin.
In the light of Stonewall and the gay rage of the last 1960s and the early 1970s, the
legal reforms that began to peep through the gloom and then blossom and burst upon
us, especially in South Africa, in the 1990s and in this millennium, those dread years
could be called the Years of Timidity. But who could blame these gay ancestors of
ours? Wildeblood’s book bristles with fear mixed with outrage. A message he sent to
his mother speaks it all: ``The jury are out now…Whatever they decide, I do not want
you to be ashamed of anything I have done. Be glad rather, that at last a little light has
been cast on this dark territory [emphasis mine] in which, through no fault of their
own, many thousands of other men are condemned to live, in loneliness and fear.’’ 3
And, of course, it wasn’t just the fear of the law, there was and in certain individual
cases still is, the fear of society and its disapproval. Again as Wildeblood puts it,
being in the dock charged with such offences (consenting sexual behaviour between
adult homosexuals) “implies the down fall, and perhaps the ruin of a human being”.4
For, as Wildeblood goes on, “A man who feels an attraction towards other men is a
social misfit only; once he gives way to that attraction, he becomes a criminal.”5
2
Wildeblood, Peter, Against The Law, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955, (175).
Wildeblood. (92/93).
4
Wildeblood, (1).
5
Wildeblood, (3).
3
2
Wildeblood and his fellow `conspirators’ would go to prison in 1954. Just the year
after the second openly gay novel in English written in the twentieth century, The
Charioteer, by Mary Renault was published The first was Gore Vidal’s 1948 novel,
The City and the Pillar. The Charioteer was published by an astonished Longmans,
purveyors, in the main, of school text books. It would be Renault’s last novel set in
her own time.
1953. This was the year in which an equally astonished, anguished and convicted Sir
John Gielgud was told by the presiding magistrate at his trial for soliciting a man in a
`cottage’ that “You will leave this courtroom, and immediately seek the help of your
doctor.”6
I will turn now from the minor key of these gay lamentations only to return to them
later in what, I hope, will be a bold and approving major key with the facts of a story
of a boy we will call `Stephen’.
To write about homosexuality in a permissive age was Renault’s goal. During her
school years she devoured the Platonic dialogues and the title of her first gay novel,
The Charioteer signposts precisely her devotion to and understanding of Platonic
meaning. The extraordinary flight of fancy, that great metaphor of the Charioteer, the
winged chariot and the two horses is emblematic of her ethical and moral concerns in
The Last of the Wine and in her later Greek novels.
In Plato’s Phaedrus the philosopher states the noblest and most honourable
achievement of Man. It has to do with flight, with the soul of Man in glorious,
powerful flight above the Earth, soaring “into the region above, where the gods
dwell”.7
Plato says, “Let us…compare the soul to a winged charioteer and his team acting
together. Now all the horses and charioteers of the gods are good and come of good
stock, but in other beings there is a mixture of good and bad. First of all we must
make it plain that the ruling power in us men drives a pair of horses, and next that one
of these horses is fine and good and of noble stock, and the other the opposite in every
way.”8
And so the charioteer driving his winged chariot battles against the opposing forces of
the white horse and the black horse. Plato goes on, “The function of the wing is to
take what is heavy and raise it up into the region above, where the gods dwell; of all
things connected with the body, it has the greatest affinity with the divine, which is
endowed with beauty, wisdom, goodness and every other excellence. These qualities
are the prime source of nourishment and growth to the wings of the soul, but their
opposites, such as ugliness and evil, cause the wings to waste and perish.”9
As she turns the issues in The Last of the Wine (from here on to be known as Wine),
Renault holds this extraordinary metaphor of Man striving upwards for the Good as
6
Morley, Sheridan, The Authorized Biography of John Gielgud, Hodder & Stoughton, 2001, (231)
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Walter Hamilton, Penguin Books, 1973 (51).
8
Phaedrus, (50/51).
9
Phaedrus, ( 51).
7
3
the steadying vice holding the complimentary ideas of Honour and Heroism in 5th
century Athens firmly in place.
Wine tells the story of Alexias, a young Athenian of good family. He grows up as the
Peloponnesian War (circa 440-404 BCE) is drawing to its long, agonising close in the
last two decades of the 5th century, from about the mid 420s-404 BCE. The power and
influence of the aristocratic class in Athens is dwindling, undermined by the age-long
conflict with Sparta. The narrow and selective democracy of ancient Athens is finally
blasted when the Spartans conquer the city and set up the oligarchy of the Council of
Thirty (Tyrants).
Prior to this, Alexias, as a sixteen year old, is drawn to the controversial teachings of
Sokrates and it is Sokrates who contrives the circumstances in which Alexias meets
the man who will be his erastēs, or senior partner in the love-affair. This is Lysis, a
twenty-five year old of overpowering golden beauty. As Lysis’s erōmenos10 (the
object of the older man’s passion and desire) the darkly pretty Alexias embarks on an
odyssey of heroism, of learning the arts of war and of philosophy. As the back cover
of the most recent edition of the novel from Arrow Books puts it, with abandoned
inaccuracy: `…the two youths become inseparable [euphemism!], wrestling together
in the palaestra [nonsense - Lysis is the wrestler, Alexias the sprinter, they never
wrestle each other], journeying to the Olympic Games [wrong – they go to the
Isthmian Games] and fighting in the wars against Sparta. On the great historical
canvas of famine, siege and civil conflict, their relationship [euphemism!]
captures vividly the intricacies of ancient Greek culture [euphemism].’11
Good Zeus above! Why can’t Arrow Books say it? Alexias and Lysis are two of the
most distinguished, courageous, attractive, both physically and intellectually,
homosexual lovers in all English literature. By Aphrodite, the edition published in
1960 by Four Square Books had two bold illustrations back and front of two nude
youths, genitals gracefully covered, either wrestling provocatively or scraping down
with a strigil after exercise. True, in the Years of Timidity, it might have been that
some `nice boys’ (an Irish lady’s euphemism, I discovered, for gay men) covered the
book with brown paper. Not to put too a fine a point on it, the kind of love I am
dealing with is this, to quote Camille Paglia from Sexual Personae, “Greek pederasty
honoured the erotic magnetism of male adolescents in a way that today brings the
police to the door.”12 There the word is firmly out of the closet.
But let me get back to finer things. What then is the distinguishing mark of Wine?
There are quarrels, familial and between lovers, there are painfully described battles,
there are horrendous injuries in battle, there are athletics, there is politics aplenty.
there is philosophy; there are observed great and fundamental human truths of life,
love, war and death. All these and many other attributes make the reading of this
novel an epic experience. An experience that leaves you breathless with excitement
and then in the gentle closing pages settles you into a mood of contemplation and
quietness.
10
Cf. Dover, K. J., Greek Homosexuality, Duckworth, 1979, (16) for more on the meanings of these
words.
11
Renault, Mary, The Last of the Wine, Arrow Books, 2004 (Back Cover)
12
Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae, Penguin Books, 1992 (115).
4
Above all the distinguishing mark as it imposes its pattern on your mind and soul and
as you close the book admitting silently to yourself, `Yes, my dear13, that is exactly as
it was in late 5th century Athens’ (the ultimate paean for the perfect historical novel).
The distinguishing mark is that the nature of the homosexual relationship, love-affair,
in those times was “love in honourable fashion” (as Ophelia says of Hamlet’s
attentions to her) between young men of heroic mould.
Aristophanes sums up the `intricacies of Ancient Greek culture’ in these matters of
love between erōmenos and erastēs in his typically robust way when he has one of the
main characters in The Birds, Euelpides, answer the question `…what kind of city
would you most prefer to live in?’14 with:
A city where the father of a blooming boy
Would meet me and complaint like this, as if wronged:
“It’s a dandy way you treat my son, Mr Smoothy!
You met him leaving the gymnasium after his bath,
And you didn’t kiss him, chat him up, or hug him,
Or fondle his balls – and you my old family friend!”15
Fondling balls. `Interfering’ with a pre-pubescent boy’s `private parts’, as a
contemporary police report might have it, is a dramatic moment in Wine, setting up
the main villain of the piece, the poet, dramatist and politician, Kritias, who is
hounded by the gorgeous Alexias to the end of the novel where Alexias slaughters
him in the great battle that liberated Athens from the Spartan yoke. But early in the
novel the pre-pubescent Alexias is serving wine at a symposium banquet given by his
father, Myron, for a group of friends, his club.
“When I reached [Kritias] with the wine…he praised my modesty, saying I had the
manners of a better age…I could see my father listening with approval. But as soon as
he turned his head away, Kritias moved his cup a little, so that the wine spilled down
my clothes. On this he apologised, said he hoped it would leave no stain, and put his
hand under the hem of my tunic in such a way that, to everyone but me, he would
have seemed to be feeling the cloth…
I don’t know how I refrained from the bringing the pitcher down upon his head.”16
Renault makes the point that for grown men in Ancient Athens to pay sexual
attentions to young boys was considered at the very least `absurd’. The black horse
has brought us down to Earth with a bump in that scene. Pausanius in his speech in
13
Renault in addressing one would often use this term of endearment, “my dear, the Greeks would
never…” She has Lysis and other characters use it in the novel more than once. Cf. as example pages
86 and 87. Lysis is challenging Alexias, whose mother had died, as to why he refers to his stepmother
as “Mother”. Alexias says, “…his words distressed me. `But she is my mother, Lysis. If she is not…if
she is not I never had one.’ He saw I was troubled and embracing me kindly said, `Why then, my dear,
of course she is.’ ”
14
Aristophanes, The Birds, trans. Jeffery Henderson, Focus Classical Library R. Pullins Company,
1999, (24/25).
15
Birds, (25).
16
Wine, (28).
5
Symposium says, “…don’t have affairs with boys who are younger than the age at
which intelligence begins to form, which…coincides with when they grow a beard.”17
In the novel Sokrates brings the sixteen year old Alexias and the twenty-five year old
Lysis together and so begins the unfolding of a passionate and heroic affair of the
heart, the body and the head.
Plato’s Symposium underpins (with the image of the Charioteer never going out of
focus) Renault’s ethical and moral concerns as she plays out this relationship. There is
a loving and colloquial reference to Symposium in the novel. The Sokratic gathering
have been listening to Sokrates on love and on page 89 of the novel Alexias tells us,
“Pausanias said, `It is a long time since Sokrates last gave us what we heard today. It
was at your house, Agathon, do you remember? When we drank to your first crown.’
[Agathon says:] “ `I shall be dead, my dear, when I forget that.’ “18
Symposium is not easy to summarise. But as we all know it is the book in which the
club at Agathon’s banquet sets out to answer the question “What is love?”. Each of
the speakers adds a storey to the `building’ and so we are elevated from the idea of
love as a brutal activity of body and mind (fucking), to civilized love where matters
are more courtly and the mind becomes engaged at an intellectual level (you can’t
fuck all day), to the apogee, divine love, where lust, things of the body have no place,
but we are lifted through our love for another into a world of truth and purity and
ultimate goodness, to a dimension of faith and spirituality where the ultimate
goodness flourishes. It is Sokrates who unravels this final, `heightened’ definition,
allowing it to be characterized by the priestess, Diotima. (Plato has Sokrates bring
many awkward. complex and thoroughly infuriating issues to bear on the matter in
challenging the speakers who have gone before him. Not the least of which is the idea
of procreation bringing immortality.)
But in Wine Renault takes up with vigour the idea that Sokrates expresses: that the
object of Love is goodness and yet Agathon’s argument that the object of Love is
beauty (being separate from the idea of Love as goodness) is never far behind in the
novel, and the object of Love for the older man, i.e. to educate the younger man is an
important goal. As Robin Waterfield explains in a note to his translation of
Symposium, “the Greek word for `attractive’ (kalos) was a general term of
commendation which could be used for moral qualities as much as for physical
attributes…”19
Diotima has told Sokrates that “the object of love is the permanent possession of
goodness for oneself”20 Alexias says, “…first love, like the light of dawn, sheds a
kind of beauty wherever you look.”21
Alexias and Lysis are good people, very good people indeed. They radiate the values
of truthfulness, faithfulness, honour and, above all, trust. The playwright Athol
Fugard in his play The Road To Mecca has the character Elsa, speaking in despair of a
disappointed love-affair, say that the `big word’ is not love, but trust.
17
Symposium, (14)
Wine, (89).
19
Plato, Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford University Press, 1998, (84).
20
Symposium, (48).
21
Wine, (99).
18
6
The idea of honour is emphasised again and again in the novel. There is honour of the
heart in the passionate love-affair between the leading characters, there is the honour
of the family, there is the honourable respect shown to the gods (turned on its head
when Renault handles the famed breaking of the herms, the blame laid at the feet of
the dazzling Alkibiades, but shifted, in the novel, to Kritias), there is the honour of the
city, honour on the fields of battle, in the gymnasiums and at the athletics games.
Honour in love: Alexias is at one of the Sokratic debates, Sokrates turns to the boy
and says: “`I see…that you are a judge of value, though so young. Perhaps you can
tell me then…what price one ought to pay for a true and honourable lover?’ I
answered…that one ought not to pay anything.
[Sokrates] looked at me searchingly, and nodded his head. `An answer worthy,
Alexias, of your father’s son…If we come into the company of such a lover, it seems
to me that one of three things will happen. Either he will succeed in making us equal
to his honour; or, if he fails both to do this and to free himself from love, seeking to
please us he will become less good than he was; or, if he is of stronger mind,
remembering what is due to the gods and to his own soul, he will be master of
himself, and go away. Or can you see some other conclusion than these?’
`I don’t think, Sokrates,” I said, ‘that there can be another.’
`So, then it now appears does it not, that the price of an honourable lover is to be
honourable ourselves…’22
The pure light of honour burnishes the heroism of the two central lovers. The young
men are heroic in all senses of the word. Domestically as when Alexias takes on the
duties as head of the home, presuming his father has been killed in the abortive
Athenian expedition against Sicily at Syracuse; in the field of battle as when Lysis
heroically places his own life at risk to save Alexias from the spears of the Spartans;
as when they both stoutly defend the teachings of Sokrates against the menace of the
older guard (and we know, tragically, where that led); politically when they
vigorously join their fellows in an attempt to defy the engulfing tide of oligarchy
which threatens and then does drown that most precious idea given to the world by
the ancient Athenians, democracy.
Lysis and Alexias, who have grown up with an intimate knowledge of Homer’s
heroes in the Iliad and The Odyssey, and the powerful creation myth of Hesiod’s
Theogony, are as much heroes in the imaginative world of Wine as are those other
ancient, poetic heroes.
Many ribs flow onto the spine of this motivating idea, honour and the heroic outlook,
in the novel, and the skeleton is well fleshed. Perhaps the sexiest and most moving is
the sub-plot of the Melian, Phaedo, captured at the sacking of the island city of Melos
by the Athenians and brought to Athens as a slave and sold into a male brothel. His
shame and deep sense of dishonour move in elegant counterpoint to the central love-
22
Wine (74 /75).
7
affair of the book. Phaedo’s beauty, his fineness of spirit, his intellectual brilliance are
captured movingly in the novel.
Renault had standing in her writing room a copy of the head of the Blonde Ephebe
and, as she told me on a social occasion (repeated by Sweetman), she stared at this
face and used it in this description of Phaedo by the narrator, Alexias: “The youth
[Phaedo] had what one often hears of from the lyric poets, but seldom sees; very dark
eyes, with hair of the clearest blonde. It swung like heavy silk, cut straight across the
brows, which were strongly drawn and lifted outward. His mouth was nobly carved ,
but strange, brooding and secret; his beauty was not of Apollo but of Dionysos. His
eyes never left Sokrates’ face. They were deep and subtle; you could see the thoughts
running in them like fish in dark water.”23
Phaedo is freed by the good services of one of the Sokratic crowd and goes on to
become a publisher of a sort and a teacher of philosophy. He never finds love within
the action of the novel, as does Plato when he falls head over heels with Aster, a boy
of such charm and beauty that he can even tempt Alexias into the possibility of
adultery. “…I will note his eyes, which were of a blue more like the night sky than the
day, and his clear wide brows.”24Then there is Xenophon, a close friend to Alexias,
who grows up alongside Alexias. Xenophon is a fish out of water in this ancient
society. He has no sexual interest in the male sex, which is considered odd by those
around him. But what is so enchanting about Renault’s portrayal of Xenophon is his
devotion to horses and horsemanship. She had devoured his treatise On
Horsemanship. Xenophon solemnly advises Alexias, left to assist with the upbringing
of his baby sister in the absence of his father, to bring her up as he might a mare!
A diversion.
The characters who appear in Wine are a cunning amalgam of the real and the
invented. Alexias is invented, but Lysis is not. And his appearance is an indication of
how, in her reading, nothing escaped Renault’s scholarly eye.
She was reading Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and his essay on
Sokrates when she came upon this, “Lysis…[Sokrates} turned by exhortation, into a
most virtuous character. For he had the skill to draw his arguments from facts.” 25 I
had noted this with an exclamation mark in my copy of Diogenes Laertius in 1992.
Sweetman would also pick this up in the biography in 1993.
The entire gathering of Plato’s Symposium, with the obvious exception of the
Mantinean priestess, Diotima, appear in the novel. Charmides is there in the world of
Wine, charming all with his beauty and alarming everyone with his sarcastic wit. He
calls to Lysis who is sitting with Alexias “on the grassy slope of Kephissos” soon
after the beginning of their affair, upbraiding him for having won such a prize, “ `This
is too bad of you, Lysis; you are like the horse they bring in from the country after the
bets are laid. Have you held off so long just for the pleasure of seeing all the rest of us
23
Wine, ( 95).
Wine, (240).
25
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, 1991,
(159).
24
8
make fools of ourselves?”26 And then there is the playboy celebrity, Alkibiades. He
does not have a central place but he glitters around on the margins of this world
bringing sexual and political havoc, letting “slip the dogs of war” and slipping away
from the battles in fits of peek in the manner of Achilles and yet still proving the hero
until his ignominious end.
Passage after passage in the novel prove Renault’s near faultless scholarship and her
devotion to as much historical truth as historical fiction can bear. She told her
biographer Sweetman and said it again in a marvellous BBC Scotland documentary
on her work called Love and War in Ancient Greece, that the only thing she really
wanted to be remembered for was that “she got it right” historically, that where she
had to make educated guesses due to lack of historical evidence she might be proved
right in years to come and that she never wilfully distorted historical fact in order for
her narrative to be the more exciting.27
Her biographer David Sweetman latched onto one especial and blazing passage that is
an imaginative `transfiguration’ of a piece of historical narrative from Thucydides.
The historian is describing the Athenian fleet with its army on board setting sail from
Piraeus for the ill-fated expedition against Sicily that was led by Alkibiades and
Nikias.
Here is what Thucydides gives us in his History of the Peloponnesian War: “When
the ships were manned and everything had been taken aboard which they meant to
take with them on the voyage, silence was commanded by the sound of a trumpet, and
the customary prayers made before putting to sea were offered up, not by each ship
separately, but by them all together following the words of the herald. The whole
army had wine poured into bowls, and officers and men made their libations from
cups of gold and of silver. The crowd on the shore also, the citizens and others who
wished well to the expedition, joined together in the prayers. Then, when the hymns
had been sung and the libations finished, they put out to sea, first sailing in column,
and then racing each other to Aegina.”28
Renault `magicks’ Thucydides: “The Generals joined their ships, the bustle grew less
and ended. A trumpet blew a long call. Then one heard only a dying mutter, the slap
of the sea on the jetties, the cry of gulls, and the bark of some dog uneasy in the hush.
The small clear voice of a distant herald cried the Invocation. It was taken up in the
ships and on the shore; the sound flowed and rolled like surf; on each poop gold or
silver flashed, as the trierarch lifted his cup to pour the offering. Then ringing across
the water came the paean and the shouts of the pilots, bidding the ships away. The
chantymen began to give the time to the rowers; up went the great sails painted with
suns and stars and birds. So they put out to sea, the crews answering song for song,
and the pilots calling out to each other challenges to race. I saw Nikias’ white beard
flutter as he prayed with raised hands; and on the poop of Alkibiades’ trireme, which
26
Wine (82).
Yet while telling us that Phaedo was from the sacked island city of Melos, she does omit to note the
fact that the real Phaedo was a native of Elis, from good family, who on the fall of that city was taken
captive and forcibly consigned to a “house of ill-fame” in Athens. Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of
Eminent Philosophers, Volume 1 , (233).
28
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, Penguin Books, 1972, (429).
27
9
already was standing away, a little shining figure like a golden image, no bigger than
Adonis dolls the women had carried in the streets.
The sails filled, the oar-blades all together beat up and down, bright feathered wings,
like swans the ships flew singing towards the island. Tears stung my eyes [says
Alexias, the narrator]. I wept for the beauty of it, like many more. Happy for the
Athenians, if the tears that followed afterwards had been like mine.”29
This quotation is interesting in that it points so vividly the detail of Renault’s research
and her own special interests and how she used them to `colour’ the writing. The
reference to the lone dog barking is just one instance of her love for dogs that appear
regularly in her books. She always made clear that it was gazing at illustrations of
Ancient Greek vases that really informed the visual imagery in the novels. The
passage glitters with such imagery taken from the vases, the pouring of libations, the
beating of the oars and, in particular, the descriptions of the paintings on the sails.
But enough of this diversion.
Plato’s Theaetetus describes Sokrates as being the `midwife’ to ideas.30 He is the
teacher of young men. and Symposium stresses this as an important part of the loveaffair.31 Pausanius in Symposium emphasises the importance of the moral
improvement of a boy by his older lover.32 Renault presents much teaching in Wine,
from the Sokratic debates to Alexias’ school lessons and, in particular, Lysis’
required educational devotion to Alexias teaching him the arts of war, the skills of
hunting, improving his running skills in the palaestra, on the track, and his devoted
encouragement of the younger man and approbation of him.
Plato tells us in Phaedo, “…every man desires to find in his favourite a nature
comparable to his own particular divinity, and when he lights upon such a one he
devotes himself to personal imitation of his god and at the same time attempts to
persuade and train his beloved to the best of his power to walk in the ways of that god
and to mould himself upon him.”33
But all this devotion is bound up inextricably with honour. Throughout the novel
Alexias is determined that Lysis will never be ashamed of him. Lysis says to Alexias:
“As the gods hear me, Alexias, your good shall be mine, and your honour shall be like
my own to me; and I will stand to it with my life…” And Alexias responds, “Don’t be
afraid, Lysis, that while you are my friend I shall ever come to dishonour; for rather
than be a shame to you I will die…’ Lysis says: `May it never be less than this with
us.’ With those words we kissed.”34
C. M. Bowra in The Greek Experience calls it “The Heroic Outlook”.
29
Wine, (38).
Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Robin Waterfield, Penguin Books, 1987, (25/26).
31
Symposium, (52-54).
32
Symposium (14).
33
Phaedrus, (61).
34
Wine, (83).
30
10
“The individualism, which conditions imposed on [Ancient] Greek life, suited its
inherited cult of heroic manhood…
The essence of the heroic outlook is the pursuit of honour through action. The great
man is he who, being endowed with superior qualities of body and mind, uses them to
the utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no effort and shirks
no risk in his desire to make the most of his gifts and to surpass other men in his
exercise of them. His honour is the centre of his being.”35
I seem to remember Renault getting a rather irritable review in Time magazine when
she published The Mask of Apollo in 1966 in which the critic referred to her boy
scout-type heroes. When I asked her about this in the radio interview back then she
denied any such thing. I might have been wrong. But I think it is important that the
heroes of Wine are no goody-four-sandals. They have faults. Alexias is jealous of
Lysis’ hetairā, lady love for recreational sex. Lysis can become unreasonably
demanding of the younger man and he is jealous of Alexias’ win at the Isthmian
Games and disappointed at his loss to the wrestler, Sostratos. Alexias comments:
“Lately things had not been so happy with us as before. That he should have been out
of spirits after the games I could understand; but when I found him becoming jealous,
I was bewildered.”36And there are many more human foibles, more from the younger
man than from the elder.
Then there is the dramatic episode in the novel after Alexias’ father has made his way
back from the Syracusan salt mines to Athens. He and his son find themselves at
major loggerheads. Alexias imagines murdering Myron and that moment of heart
stopping evil leads to a thrilling and sustained passage of inner turmoil and desperate
anger as the boy runs up the mountain to a shrine, chased, as he imagines, by the
Furies as was Orestes after the slaughter of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. “As they [the
Furies] gained on me I began to hear voices, like the cry of a mixed pack, some deep,
some high; and the snakes hissing, back and forth. Then as I was running downhill, I
heard one shout, `Now!’ and reach out towards me. I leaped forward, and missing my
footing rolled down the mountain-side. I think my senses left me.”37. The bruised and
battered Alexias is taken in by a kindly priest of Apollo and his wife at a shrine to the
god, the priest says to the boy. “…come into the holy place; for Apollo cannot protect
you outside.’…His hands were old, but dry and warm, and there was healing in them.
I said, `...my eyes have seen my heart, and its light is turned to darkness for ever.’ `There is a labyrinth,’ said he, `in the heart of every man; and to each comes the day
when he must reach the centre and meet the Minotaur…’ “38
The lovers grow into heterosexual activity with hetaerae in a most natural way in the
maturity of their love-affair. This is absolutely true to the `intricacies of ancient Greek
culture’ of course. And in the last sections of the book Lysis marries. This progression
from homosexuality to heterosexuality is, however, not absolutely de rigueur. The
poet and playwright Agathon and his lover, Pausanius, stay together into manhood
and travel to the court of the Macedonian King.
35
C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, Phoenix, 1994, (20/21).
Wine (185/186).
37
Wine (192).
38
Wine, (193).
36
11
I want to recall the ascending scale of the meanings of Love in Symposium. The Loveaffair commences with mutual physical attraction between the prospective partners.
Then it rises to an intellectual level where a rigorous self-discipline, intellectually and
physically, is the nature of the commerce between the lovers. And then, finally, at its
height the affair rises up into the realm of the gods and to something we might call
mystical contemplation where the “intellect is the pilot of the soul”.39
Renault does not avoid the physical. Here is Alexias’ description of Lysis’ beauty: “I
looked at Lysis with a stranger’s eyes…I thought that Theseus, setting forth in his
flower of strength to wrestle at the Isthmus, could have looked no better. His mantle
being open, the lamplight showed the beautiful hard sheen of his body, like oiled
beechwood, and the smooth curve of muscle and sinew. His neck and shoulders,
though firm as rock, had not thickened; he moved them as lightly as a racehorse.”40
But she keeps the reader waiting as the affair between the two men develops in a most
tantalizing way with Lysis not asking anything more of Alexias than a chaste kiss.
But then one glorious summer’s day the lovers ride down to the sea, tether their
horses and throw off their clothes and strike out into the water. “We rested on the
water, then swam shoreward, and in shallow rock pools tried laughing to catch fish in
our hands. But as we walked out of the water afterwards, I felt a sharp pain in the side
of my foot, and found it bleeding. I must have trodden on a broken shell or a potsherd,
for the cut was deep. Lysis knelt and looked at it while I leaned on his shoulder. `This
will give you trouble,’ he said, `if you fill it with grit as you cross the beach. It might
cost you a crown. Wash it well in the sea, and I will carry you over to the place where
a horse can go.’ For the beach was stony.
I sat on a flat-topped rock, and trailed my foot in the sea. The water was clear, and the
blood unrolled in it like smoke in a blue sky. I sat watching it till Lysis touched my
shoulder and said, `Come’. 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. We spoke without
sound each other’s names. A gull screamed over us, an empty sound, to tell us we two
were alone upon the shore.
I said to my heart, `What mighty power hast thou been defying?’ Truly love may be
likened to the Sphinx of the Egyptians, with the face of smiling god and a lion’s
claws. When he had wounded me all my longing was to leap into his darkness, and be
consumed. I called on my soul but it bled away from me like salt washed back into the
ocean. My soul melted and fled; the wound in my foot, which the water had opened,
streamed out scarlet over the wet rock.
I lay between sea and sky, stricken by the Hunter; the fiery immortal hounds of Eros,
slipped from the leash, dragged at my throat and at my vitals, to bring the quarry in. It
seemed to me now that my soul was here, if it was anywhere; nothing remained to me
of what I was, save this, that I remembered I had promised Sokrates a gift. He whom I
loved knew my mind; perhaps it was his own. We were still, understanding each
other.
39
40
Phaedrus, (52).
Wine, (153).
12
He let me go, and kneeling beside the rock, covered the wound with his mouth till the
bleeding stopped.”41
I find this description of the love-making creates a profound impression. It is oblique,
it utilizes the forces of nature, the sea, the gulls, the rocks in a lyrical, yet physically
arousing, way, but more importantly here, and at a later moment in the novel, the
sexual encounters of the lovers have a tenderness and warmth, which get under one’s
skin and bring with them a sense of wonder and goodness.
(It seems to me that women novelists have always written most evocatively, not to say
most erotically about gay sex. Ann Rice in Cry To Heaven!, Pat Barker in the first
novel in her First World War trilogy, Regeneration.)
Having coped then with the love-making, Renault sustains a sense of the powerful
physical bonds that bind Alexias and Lysis in many variations and in particular during
their athletics training and performance, in the bruising battles they fight, the wounds
they accumulate and the healing of those wounds. Her training as a nurse, her
knowledge of medical matters and of Hippocrates’ writings bring a special
authenticity to matters of sickness and injury in the novel.
A delicate part of the novel’s sophistication, something that is linked by an invisible
thread to the story’s sexuality, is the mystical nature of the love-affair, “the perfect
mystic vision”.42. Renault’s talents as a poet-novelist make these passages especially
hypnotic and appealingly strange. Steeped, like her heroes, in Homer, in Hesiod’s
Theogony, in Apollodorus’ The Library of Greek Mythology and, of course, Plato, she
is able to explore the affair in this most complex and meaningful manifestation.
Throughout the novel the relationship between Lysis and Alexias is sustained at a
mysterious and spiritual level. You will have noted that in the quotation of the lovemaking at the seaside that I have just used. In these moments of the mysterious and
irrational the bustle and opportunism of the everyday are banished. It is this
spirituality which is uniquely heroic. It binds the young men in an unassailable
devotion to each other. This aspect of their affair seems to gather up all the other good
and noble elements of the relationship and to armour them against the `slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune’. Truthfulness, faithfulness, honour and trust are
gathered up and held protectively in the arms of faith. Lysis and Alexias have the
measure of things and of their place and size as men within the cosmos. They know
the value of `nothing in excess’ and of `Man, know thyself’. Like Homer’s heroes,
they know and respect the gods, are acutely aware of the gods’ unpredictability, the
gods’ malevolencies and benevolences.
After the first dinner together at Lysis’ home, Alexias tells us, “When it grew late he
[Lysis] threw the last of his wine into the bowl saying, `This is for my Alexias,’ and
the bowl rang true. Then we drank to the Good Goddess in clear water.”43
Witnessing Sokrates in distress at the supposed bad behaviour of Alkibiades, and
what they all assume is his betrayal of Sokratic values, Alexias and Lysis go up to the
41
Wine, (116/117)
Phaedrus, (55).
43
Wine, (87).
42
13
High City [the Akropolis]. “We joined our hands; they were cold, so that in clasping
them we felt the bone within the flesh…When we came to the great altar of Athene I
stopped and said, `Shall we swear it?’ He thought for a moment and answered, `No.
When a man needs an oath, he has repented that he swore it, and is compelled by fear.
This must come from our own souls, and from love.’ “44
The telling of this remarkable love-story came at a point in the history of
homosexuality when it was so critically needed. The mid-1950s. That bleak time
when homosexuals trod the dark alleys both socially and legally.
Wine burst upon the world, and the gay world in particular, like a warm and lifeenhancing sun.
I could not believe my luck when in 1993 Julie Mullard gave me access to all
Renault’s papers. There were thousands, literally thousands, of letters from gay men
around the world. Renault had replied to them all. I read them all and where I was
lucky I read copies of her replies. I made a few scattered notes of what I thought
striking. Thank Heavens I did.
Some time in the early 2000s, Mullard sold their second home in Camps Bay. Badly
crippled now and in her nineties she moved to a Catholic nursing home. She
instructed her closest friend and carer to burn all Renault’s papers. He performed the
task dutifully. I asked him why she had given such a devastating instruction. He said
that he thought Mullard did not want to share Renault with anyone else after they
were both gone from this world. At her death Renault had completed the first draft of
a new novel. She had moved from the Greeks to the middle ages and the knights and
courtly love. Dutifully, at Renault’s explicit instruction, Mullard burnt the manuscript
of the book early in 1984.
This quotation from a young actor living in Los Angeles gives a sense of the deep
gratitude felt by her fans: “…I’ve never written a `fan letter’ before and scarce know
how to begin other than simply saying thank you for living and writing and letting me
read your creations…Thank you for letting me experience these treasures, to keep
them always, to have incorporated them into my being as part of my own self.
Through Alexias, Niko, Theseus, Bagoas and Laurie, I’ve gained knowledge of
myself, or, perhaps I should say, they have reawakened the memories of my
soul…Thank you, Mary.”45
I was deeply moved by some of the letters. Especially at a set of letters from an
eighteen year old English boy, let’s call him `Stephen’, who also supplied a
photograph, and very handsome he was. His story painted a picture of a kindly,
middle-class family, no brutal father, no ice-maiden mother, no bullying brothers.
Outwardly his life was stable and unremarkable. But it was not so within.
He was in love with one of his teachers, a man in his late 20s. In the course of these
six letters (to each of which Renault responded) the way the boy moved from lifedraining inner turmoil, disgust for the perversity of his feelings for the older man, to
44
45
Wine, (90).
Notes taken from Renault’s papers.
14
quietness and acceptance that this love was of estimable value was deeply moving.
And the still small voice in this instance was Renault’s, both in Wine, her other novels
and in her letters.
Eventually Stephen left school and was able to open up to the teacher and speak of his
love. The teacher, though single, was not gay. But he must have been a fine and
sympathetic man because he guided Stephen into the English gay world and Stephen
met a man, his ideal lover. Suddenly there were no more letters to Renault from
Stephen. But there was one from Stephen’s brother. A most sensitive and delicate
letter telling Renault that Stephen had drowned whilst out yachting. From the
brother’s letter it seemed clear that Renault’s letters to Stephen had been read by the
family. The brother’s letter brought to Renault their grateful, heartfelt thanks for her
kindness and care for the youngest in their family.
What brought Stephen’s letters to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean at Camps Bay in
Cape Town? Why his reading of The Last of the Wine, of course. Could this kind of
love be honourable, be noble? And he found that it could.
That a piece of literature could have so profound an effect on the lives of gay men
from so many differing cultures is one part of the monument to the greatness of Mary
Renault. There were also letters from mothers and fathers thanking her for helping
them understand a son. So, the novels effects were not confined to a gay coterie.
The other Greek novels that were to follow Wine; The King Must Die, The Bull From
The Sea, The Mask of Apollo, The Praise Singer, and then the Alexander trilogy, Fire
From Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games would (with the exception of the
Bronze Age books) also explore the heroic outlook and the nobility of homosexual
love and bring thousands more letters to Delos in Camps Bay and to the new home
higher up on the hillside. These included a cryptic letter from the Iranian Press
Attaché at the Imperial Iranian Embassy in London after the publication of The
Persian Boy, which read: “Your book, The Persian Boy, has been studied by the
pertinent authorities in Iran who have found that certain of your observations with
regard to the relationship between Bagoas and Darius the Third, and, subsequently,
with Alexander, are historically doubtful.
In the event, we should be grateful if you could kindly indicate what historical
documentation you have used in the compilation of your book.”46
No fatwa was threatened, thankfully. Renault wrote back tersely (a copy existed)
referring the descendants of the Persians to Arrian, to Athenaeus, to Quintus
Curtius.and to Plutarch.
What value did Renault see in the historical novel? She explained at the end of an
article on The King Must Die, “…one does not go to the past as a public utility. So
why? One can say, `Because it is there.’ But unlike Everest, not only is it there, but
we are its products. We go, perhaps to find ourselves; perhaps to free ourselves. It is
certain we shall never know ourselves, till we have broken out from the brittle capsule
of the Megalpolis, and taken a long look back along the rocky road which brought us
46
Letter from A. M. Shapurian, dated 1973.
15
where we are.”47 This was written for the London Magazine. It’s a brilliant article
which I saw in its corrected proof amongst Renault’s papers. I noted down that the
Editor had boldly written in capitals across the top of the article: “DO NOT EVEN
COPY-EDIT THIS PIECE! SET AS IS”. He ringed his instruction boldly. Such was
his unbounded enthusiasm for this piece by Mary Renault.
A letter from a priest in England dated 1973 sums up the gratitude we have for the life
and works of Mary Renault. In it he writes pithily, “Whenever I read one of your
books, I feel drawn closer to the enduring goodness of life.”48
I want to end this rumination with words from The Last of the Wine. They apply as
much to gay love as they do to directly to philosophy and to history in their context.
Alexias returns to Athens late in the story from campaigning. He comments: “So I
came back to philosophy, but differently; feeling it in myself and in those I met in
talk, a fever of the blood. I had come to it as a boy from wonder at the visible world;
to know the cause of things; and to feel the sinews of my mind, as one feels one’s
muscles in the palaestra. But now we searched the nature of the universe, and our own
souls, more like physicians in time of sickness.
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. In painting and sculpture and
verse, the names we grew passionate over looked to us as big as those of Perikles’
days, and it still half surprises me when I find them unknown to my sons…As we
hailed each new artist we grew angry with the former ones, as with false guides we
had caught out; we hastened though we knew not where. To freedom, we said; the
sculptors no longer proportioned their forms by the Golden Number of Pythagoras, as
Pheidias and Polykleitos did; and art would do great things, we said, now it had cast
off its chains.”49
---ooOoo---
47
Corrected proof of an article for the London Magazine, 1979.
Notes taken from Renault’s papers. Letter dated 1973.
49
Wine, (267).
48
16
Select Bibliography
ARISTOPHANES, The Birds, translated by Jeffery Henderson, Focus Classical
Library R. Pullins Company, 1999.
APOLLODORUS, The Library of Greek Mythology, translated by Robin Hard,
Oxford University Press, 1998.
BOWRA, C. M., The Greek Experience, Phoenix, 1994.
DIOGENES LAERTIUS Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume 1, translated by R.
D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, 1991.
DOVER K. J., Greek Homosexuality, Duckworth, 1979.
HESIOD, Theogony, translated by Dorothea Wender, Penguin Books, 1973.
HIPPOCRATES, Hippocratic Writings, translated by J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann
with I. M. Lonie and E. T. Withington, Penguin Books, 1983.
PAGLIA, CAMILLE, Sexual Personae, Penguin Books, 1992.
PLATO, Charmides, translated by W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library, 1955.
PLATO, Phaedo, translated by David Gallop, Oxford University Press, 1993.
PLATO, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, translated by Walter Hamilton, Penguin
Books, 1973.
PLATO, Symposium, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford University Press, 1998.
PLATO, Theaetetus, translated by Robin A. H. Waterfield, Penguin Books, 1987.
MORLEY, SHERIDAN, The Authorised Biography of John Gielgud, Hodder &
Stoughton, 2001.
RENAULT, MARY, The Charioteer, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House,
Inc. 2003.
RENAULT, MARY, The Nature of Alexander, Allen Lane, 1975.
RENAULT, MARY, The Last of the Wine, Arrow Books, 2004.
SWEETMAN, DAVID, Mary Renault a Biography, Chatty & Windus, 1993.
THUCYDIDES, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner,
Penguin Books, 1972.
WILDEBLOOD, PETER, Against the Law, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955.
XENOPHON, On Horsemanship in Hero The Tyrant And Other Treatises translated
by Robin Waterfield, Penguin Books, 1997.
17