The Bull from the Sea - Mary Renault

This is the second of Renault's Theseus novels, originally published in 1962. I picked it up because I have a general interest in modern novels about ancient Greece - and was blown away from the first page.

The Bull from the Sea is a stupendous piece of literature, a modern masterpiece. The Attic world is put in front of us in pitch-perfect detail. Renault keeps close to the legend whilst adding psychological subtleties which would have been irrelevant to the early Bronze Age. For those who lived within 500 years of Theseus and Hippolyta the gods juggled human fate as they pleased. This will not do for the modern reader. We want motive, reasoning, and Renault provides.

Her masterstroke is to make Theseus the narrator. That way, we have to know what he is thinking or, when he is in reflective mode, what he now makes of his earlier actions. The Bull from the Sea covers his career from his return from Crete to Athens, his expanding empire, and ultimately his death, forty or so years later. Renault covered his youth in The King Must Die, apparently, and that is now top of my must-read list. Here, meanwhile, we follow his abduction and seduction of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, the birth of their son Hippolytos, and Hippolyta's death in battle against the women she formerly led. Meanwhile Theseus keeps his pledge to the vanquished Cretans and marries Phaedra, daughter of Minos, who bears him another son, Akamas. Ultimately the two boys meet and become friends. Phaedra, though, cannot bear the thought of Hippolytos, who has all the attributes Akamas lacks, becoming Theseus's sole heir. Having learnt her treachery from her father's mistress Medea, she arranges the young man's death.

It is a loss from which Theseus cannot recover. He ends up a recluse on the island of Skyros, where he realises the time has come for him to commit suicide, like so many of his forebears, by falling off the cliffs. Just before he goes he hears about a young warrior who is desperately keen to meet him. This, brilliantly, is Achilles. Thus we know where the spirit of Theseus goes, even if what remains of his empire passes to the uninspiring but loyal Akamas. This sort of cyclical storytelling, essential to the likes of Homer and Sophocles, works equally well for Renault. There were parts I didn't like as much as others - one of them, ironically, was the handling of Oedipus in Kolonos, which I felt was too Sophoclean; the other the Kentaurs, which I would could have lived without altogether. What struck me most, though, was the Bull from the Sea itself. Renault handles this beautifully. Early on in the book the Cretans bring the a prize bull from the Labyrinth in an effort to speed up Theseus's marriage to Phaedra; which means we aren't expecting it all when another bull, possibly descended from the first and brought to where it is by the sea, turns up in Hippolytos's moment of crisis.

Superb. I cannot recommend The Bull from the Sea highly enough.

Euripides V - Andromache, Herakles' Children, Herakles

Volume V in the Methuen Euripides series edited by my former drama lecturer, J Michael Walton.  He and I failed to see eye to eye on more or less everything but I have to admit I found his introduction here interesting, reliable and stimulating.

On the other hand the translation of Andromache, the main reason I bought the book, is downright bloody awful.  I really cannot stomach translators who want to advertise their own dramatic conceits.  A new version by an established creative writer, like Ted Hughes, or Brecht, or Tony Harrison - that's something else, a new version of an ancient original.  This exercise by Robert Cannon is just risible.  I'm no Greek scholar but I'm willing to bet Euripides didn't write one clause per line.  Ghastly.  Still, I suppose it's a measure of Euripides' greatness that a powerful tragedy still shines through.

I had assumed, in my ignorance, that Herakles' Children and Herakles itself weren't up to much - scraps from the master's table.  With the former I was definitely wrong - the battle of wills between Herakles' mother Alkmene and the devious Eurystheus, King of Argos and deviser of the Twelve Labours, is compelling.  A complicated back story, mixing one part history with four parts myth, is expertly doled out in bite-sized portions.  And Herakles himself isn't in it.  Indeed, Euripides' fascination with the hero - both here and in the eponymous play - seems to be about the human consequences of godlike heroic achievement.  That said, Herakles itself seems to be missing an act.  Did Euripides really just have a character called Madness appear, make a speech, send our hero off his nut and then just bugger off?  I don't think so.  But I did enjoy the Choral song about the Twelve Labours, which sounded to me like an extremely ancient form incorporated by Euripides as a device to demonstrate just how long ago his play was set.

The translation of the two Herakles plays is by Kenneth McLeish and a much happier product.  This, after all, is meant to be basically a source book from which performers can then build their own interpretation.

The Ancient Greeks - M I Finley

Moses Finley sounds like my kind of academic - harassed out of the US by the McCarthy witch-hunt.  This book was definitely my kind of book - solid academic information in a highly readable form.  The original 1963 hardback was apparently subtitled "An Introduction to their Life and Thought", which is exactly what Finley provides.  I, for example, had never really understood the so-called Greek Dark Ages or just how tied up with the rise of Athens Pericles was.  Finley soon sorted that out.  He apparently also wrote (amongst much else) The World of Odysseus, which is now high up on my reading wish list.  Recommended.