2019 read #19: The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault.

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
447 pages
Published 1956
Read from September 14 to September 18
Rating: 4 out of 5

As a kid, first reading my older brother's social studies textbook and then branching out into history books scavenged from wholesaler warehouse sales, I idolized Athens. I felt proud of their democracy, even though I had absolutely no connection to it. I felt prouder still when, in summaries of the Peloponnesian War, Athens made temporary headway against those Spartan louts; I felt corresponding grief when Athens' fortunes turned.

Western Europeans have loved to claim cultural continuity with Rome ever since the Dark Ages, and with ancient Greece ever since the Renaissance. This is a long-standing cultural myth. There is no neat progression of one culture feeding into another, no diffusion of cultural "light" from one cradle of civilization to another. Western Europe was always a cultural backwater, and the only continuity is what they appropriated for themselves after discovering classic Greek writings when they fought against Greece's true cultural heirs (at least in terms of mathematics and philosophy) during the Crusades. America's Founding Fathers certainly bought into this myth, adding further legends of America's inheritance from republican Rome and democratic Athens. Perhaps that's why I championed that middle-school textbook version of Athens as a kid; printed around the end of the Cold War, my brother's textbook no doubt laid the propaganda on thick.

As an adult, I've developed a better understanding of just how ghastly and horrible republican Rome and democratic Athens were, and how they truly presaged the ghastly and horrible first two centuries of the American experiment. Athenian men discoursed on the meanings of freedom, human goodness, and good government, all while owning slaves, invading and genociding rival city-states for economic gain, and regarding women and children as essentially livestock, subject to the whims of their male heads of household. It's hard, really, to tell any difference between them and the framers of the Constitution. To this day, maintained as propaganda for America's forever-wars in Southwest Asia, we cling to this myth of Greece (read: conservative White Europeans and Americans) as a bastion of liberty and personal freedom fighting for survival against the despotism of "the East" (read: Islam, Jews, brown people, homosexuals—somehow all conflated into an all-encompassing Other that HATES OUR FREEDOMS). If you see a decal of a Corinthian helmet on someone's car, odds are they're a white supremacist on some level, someone who embraced the symbology of 300 as it metastasized throughout right-wing America.

The Last of the Wine was one of the first books mentioned when I asked for recommendations after getting my library card in 2012. (I forget who suggested it—it was over seven years ago, somehow.) Though published in 1956, it explores this tension between the high-minded ideals of Athenian philosophy and the ugly reality of its cultural norms. It tells a beautiful love story between two men who are drawn into the philosophical circle around Sokrates, while demonstrating that the cultural celebration of male love (as in many martial, patriarchal societies) was built upon a foundation of utterly nauseating, literally dehumanizing misogyny. Its two noble heroes become staunch democrats and fight against tyrants and oligarchs for almost a decade, yet their philosophical high-mindedness is only possible thanks to their vast privilege of wealth, status, and gender affording them leisure and education. One could write a library of dissertations dissecting the intersectionality of these characters and Renault's vividly realized Attica. The parallels between Sokrates' Athens and the conservative myth of America, whether intended by the author or not, were impossible to ignore.

All that said, I adore this book. The story is poignantly told, rich with eroticism and devotion, bitter with jealousy and generation upon generation of trauma. I started reading it after all this time after seeing it name-checked in Jo Walton's Among Others (which I partially reread recently, after encouraging my partner to read it); fittingly, The Last of the Wine stirred my deeply buried urge to write. The sweep of its historical setting, the antique dialogue nonetheless sparkling with personality and cadence, the interplay of love and war—it all made me want to write fantasy stories, and helped me to understand why so much fantasy fiction before the 1980s (and continuing on to today, if The Priory of the Orange Tree is any indication) seemed to borrow so much from the trappings of historical fiction. In brief: I want to write something that captures the feel of this book, without having to do all that labor-intensive research first.