2023/148: The Last of the Wine — Mary Renault

2023/148: The Last of the Wine — Mary Renault

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. [loc. 4289]

Read for book club: technically a reread, but it's at least twenty years (and probably more than thirty) since I first read this novel. Curiously, the one image that I remembered from that earlier reread is the narrator's father, Myron, turning a wine bowl in his hands: 'inscribed on the one side MYRON and on the other ALKIBIADES'. For The Last of the Wine is about (among other things) the Peloponnesian War, and Alkibiades' chequered career, and the Tyranny of the Thirty. The focus, though, is on the narrator Alexias: his adolescence, his many admirers, his education at the feet of Socrates, his love affair with Lysis, his difficult relationship with his father, and his experience of war.

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