Often cited as the finest writer of historical fiction that specializing in the ancient Greek world, the late and great Mary Renault had a love for classical Greece that she displayed through fourteen novels and a biography of Alexander the Great, entitled The Nature of Alexander.
Born in London and educated at Oxford, she trained as a nurse and wrote her first three novels while serving in WWII. After the war, she settled in South Africa and traveled extensively in Africa, Greece and the Mediterranean. It was her travels to Corinth, Samos, Crete, Delos, Aegina and other islands as well as to Athens, Sounion and Marathon that resulted in her brilliant reconstructions of ancient Greece in her novels.
As openly gay as the times would allow, she lived with her partner until her death in Cape Town in 1983 and was hailed as being a gay literary icon for accurately displaying the full range of sexualities found in the ancient world in her works, just as they would have existed openly back then. Well ahead of her time in so many ways, she is sorely missed.
I became aware of her work in college while taking a course on Alexander the Great I read her trilogy of fiction on his life; The Persian Boy, The Praise Singer and Funeral Games_. All personalized the most famous secular figure in world history and one can tell when Oliver Stone made his film he had read them.
Other works by Renault I adore include Last of the Wine, the story of Athens at the time of Socrates told through the eyes of one of his students, and a brilliant recreation of the ancient Minoan culture in The Bull From the Sea. There are really none of her works I can not wholeheartedly endorse to a lover of the ancient world or anyone who wants to see what day to day life was like during the period.
Non-Fiction on Ancient Greece:
From the summer of 2015 until the fall of 2016, I decided to revisit a period in ancient history that I had only a cursory knowledge of from previous course work, that is ancient Greece and its neighbors from pre-history until the Roman ascent in the second century. Thousands of scholarly works have been published on these subjects, so I reached out to friends in academia to recommend titles and these are the ones I managed to read and can personally endorse. I found them instrumental in giving me a foundation to my studies and enjoyed them all immensely. My apologies to the authors and to you, readers, for not reviewing each individually, but this could quickly turn into a blog about ancient Greece if I did so.
If you have a question, I will gladly direct you to a specific source if you email me your query.
A. Andrews: The Greek Tyrants
W. Burkell: Greek Religion
P.J. Bicknell: Kleisthenes as a Politician
Thomas Cahill: Sailing the Wine Dark Sea
P. Cartledge: The Greeks. A Portrait of Self and Others_, Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300 -362 B.C.
J.M.Cook: The Persian Empire
Franz Cumont: The Mysteries of Mithra (Cumont was a legendary genius and all his works are still benchmarks in their field)
Desborough: The Last Mycenaean's and their successors
C. Dougherty: The Poetics of Colonization
C.W.J.Elliot: Coastal Demes of Attika
Finley: Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, The Ancient Greeks
A.J. Graham: Colony and Mother City in Ancient Greece
Robert Graves: Greek Myths
Peter Green: Alexander of Macedon, Alexander to Action
Edith Hall: Introducing the Ancient Greeks
Hans Hauben: Alexander Heirs
F. Hartog: The Mirror of Herodotus
C. Hignett: A history of the Athenian Constitution
A. Jacquemin: Delphes, Oracles, Cultures et Jaux
Kagan: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War
R.W. Livingston: The Greek Genius and its Meaning To Us
Lloyd: Greek Science After Aristotle
Long: Hellenistic Philosophy
S.L. Marchand: Down From Olympus. Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany 1750-1970
N. Marinatas: Art and Religion in Thera
Meander: Plays and Fragments
R. Meiggs: The Athenian Empire
C. Morgan: Athletes and Oracles
Ober, Josiah: The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece
Plato: The Last Days of Socrates
Pouncy: The Necessities of War
Ronilly: The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens
A.M. Snodgrass: The Dark Ages of Greece
St.Croix: The Origins of the Peloponnesian War
Oliver Taplin: Greek Fire
D.A. Traill: Excavating Shlieman
P. Warren: The Aegean Civilizations
Winkler: The Constraints of Desire
M. Wood: In Search of the Trojan War
Ian Worthington: By the Spear
Zeitlin: Nothing to do with Dionysus
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