This month marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Mary Renault. Renault was a major writer of fiction set in the ancient world. Her novels create vivid ancient worlds, textured with the rough splintered grain of life as it is lived and vibrating to the beat of contemporary trends.
She wrote many books, including contemporary fiction and non-fiction, but her most famous set of novels, published in the late sixties and early seventies, center on Alexander the Great presenting a complex figure. These books have overshadowed her other ancient novels (and much more her contemporary novels like The Charioteer).
I will focus on her two Theseus novels The King Must Die (1958) and The Bull from the Sea (1962).
Her major source was Plutarch, who began his life of the mythic figure with the pointed lines:
‘Just as geographers … crowd onto the outer edges of their maps of the parts of the earth which elude their knowledge, with explanatory notes “What lies beyond is sandy desert without water and full of wild beasts,” or “blind marsh,” or “Scythian cold,” or “frozen sea,” so in the writing of my Parallel Lives, now I have traversed those periods of time which are accessible to probable reasoning and which afford basis for a history dealing with facts, might well say of the earlier periods: “what lies beyond is full of marvels and unreality, a land of poets and fabulists, of doubt and obscurity.”
Theseus, 1 (translated by Bernadotte Perrin)
Nevertheless, Plutarch gave it a go, concocting a credible-ish sounding history from a range of sources, following the classic cradle to grave model of biographers.
It is perhaps the differences between societies and the gaps in our knowledge that would attract most modern novelists and readers to the ancient world. In her Alexander novels, Renault explores homosexual themes at a time when it was illegal or not acceptable to be gay. A still important topic.
Yet, I think her Theseus novels might be of interest to readers of the 21st century because of its understanding of how humans interact with and are impacted by the ‘other-than-human’.
Plutarch’s ancient Athens is a godless world, which is perhaps surprising, given the fact he was a Priest of Delphi. Renault’s world by contrast is full of religions, if not quite, of gods.
The first Theseus novel begins with the vivid image of a powerful king horse, so real you can smell his breath on the back of your neck. This is the first of a series of kings in the novel who must die, in this case a sacrificial death. In this, Renault followed ideas of J.G. Frazer The Golden Bough who identified a first form of religion as a belief in a dying and rising sacred king linked to seasonal change and fertility. The King Horse has replaced a human sacred king, acting as a proprietary sacrifice. Throughout the novels, as Theseus travels between different cultures, the difference between animal and human sacrifice is unstable.
Towards the end of the novels, he reflects on his career:
at Eleusis the rites have been tamed, as everyone knows. Before my time, a dead king was dug into the cornland every year. When it came to my turn, I had other notions. But I did honour to the Goddess, by marrying her to a god instead, and calling in the great bard to devise the ritual. Though it was secret, the initiates could say there was no more unseemliness, nor danger beyond what comes of bringing one’s mortal soul before the Immortals. And after that darkness, there is light.
The Bull from the Sea, page 213
Theseus credits himself too much. Animals impede on civilised societies in complex ways.
The novel’s most arresting part is the section set on Crete. Theseus, the minotaur, the Labyrinth etc. is a well known myth, but Renault uses this as source material for a brilliant piece of ‘worldbuilding’ (as Miranda Carter aptly described it on the LRB podcast). Without ruining the plot, Renault extends Theseus’ time on the island and explores what he and the other members of the Athenian tribute might actually have done on the island using archaeological theories of the time. I think this alone has had a massive influence on later writers.
Renault’s Theseus is a complex, not totally sympathetic, character.
Plutarch was quite critical of Theseus, writing that he “can hardly… escape the charge of parricide, be the plea of his advocate ever so long and the judges ever so lenient”. He continues ‘the transgressions of Theseus in his rapes of women admit of no plausible excuse” (Theseus and Romulus V-VI).
Renault lets Theseus justify these deeds in his own voice, but the gaps between what he argues and what he does is noticeable. For example, he presents himself as defensive of his father Aegeus. In one memorable passage he threatens an enslaved woman by throwing her off a wall. ‘Look, well Bitch-Eyes … That’s where you’ll go if I ever catch you playing my father false, or doing him harm.” The malevolent threat is still palpable even through the dated prose.
The Theseus novels are well paced and engaging, an easy read, but unsettling. They leave an aftertaste, sharp like blood and just as sickening.
Featured image: Europa being kidnapped by Zeus in the form of a bull. 1 – 200 CE, mirror case, gilt bronze Ashmolean Museum.
Rhakotis 