I was looking for a bathtub book, something to distract me from the politics of the moment, so I grabbed The Last of the Wine off the shelf. As I remembered, it’s the most straightforward love story of Mary Renault’s Greek novels; the secondary bit is the formation of a Socratic school of thought, or at least a group of people around Socrates. All of this, as it happens historically, takes place during the fall of Athens, or at least the fall of what I think of as Athens. I hadn’t been prepared for the politics in the book.
You see, the Athenians, more or less democratically, more or less elect a group of people who more or less allow the oligarchs to take over, in part by overextending themselves with empire-building, misreading alliances and foreign politics, and allowing unfounded smears to take the place of policy argument. The oligarchs use fear to divide the city, subvert (or ignore) the process of criminal trials, and encourage informers (with their own agendas) to destroy the lives of anybody opposed to their policies. If it had been written last year, I would have likely groused about the clumsy satire of current events; it was written in 1956, and some people likely groused about the clumsy satire of McCarthyism and postwar American empire building. In fact, it’s probably about Greece, and Sparta, and Syracuse, and so on.
Anyway, it’s a sweet and bitter lovestory, and although it remains only my fourth (or so) favorite of the eight Greek novels, it’s a swell book. If any Gentle Reader has been reading Plato, and hasn’t read this, it would be a shame.
,
-Vardibidian.