Book Review: The Last of the Wine

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault

📖 Book Review: The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault

Vintage (2001) | 400 pages

Some books tell you what happened, and some remind you what it felt like.  The Last of the Wine is the second kind.

Mary Renault sets her story in Athens during the long, slow dying of a golden age, and she does not flinch.  Alexias, her narrator, is born into the democracy’s twilight, a boy trained in rhetoric, wrestling, and honor, trained for a city that will not survive him. His father is stern, his tutor is Socrates, his love is Lysis, a boy as reckless and alive as the city once was.

Renault does not sentimentalize them.  The world they move through — the dusty agora, the bright violence of the gymnasium, the ritualized softness of the symposium — is built on habit, already fraying.  She gives us the plagues, the purges, the Sicilian catastrophe. She lets us watch Athens betray itself with the weary inevitability of a body failing its limbs.

At Olympia, Alexias wins the race, and for a moment, you believe it matters. 

Socrates appears, as he must, and what strikes you is not his wisdom as a pronouncement, but his wisdom as a way of living inside uncertainty.  He asks questions no one wants to answer.  He suggests that virtue is not inherited with citizenship, knowledge is not possession, and the gods are not so easily known.  In the book, Socrates is not a monument.  He is a man sitting barefoot in the dust, arguing not for the triumph of Athens, but for the soul’s clarity amid its collapse. He teaches Alexias not how to win, but how to lose without surrendering to bitterness. In the end, not Athens survives, but this idea: that inquiry, even in defeat, is a form of grace.

Mary Renault herself understands collapse.  Born Eileen Mary Challans in London, trained as a nurse, Renault lived through the Blitz and the bloodletting of another civilization’s turning point. She left England after the war, settling in South Africa with her lifelong partner, and from there wrote a series of novels—first modern, then ancient-that dealt, always, with courage, exile, the thin line between loyalty and betrayal. The Last of the Wine was her first foray into Greece, and it showed: a rigor, a precision, an ache for a world that never quite existed except in the mind’s yearning.

Renault’s gift is not merely historical accuracy — though she has it — but something more challenging to name: a way of making the distant past feel intimate, a breath caught in the throat. 

In the end, The Last of the Wine is not about politics, nor even war. It is about the stubborn, beautiful act of living in a world already slipping away. It is about what it means to love something after it has begun to die.

It reminds you that this is the only way anything (people and places) is ever loved if you have lived long enough.

QUOTES:

“It is better to die than to do what is base.” Page ~58

“To love virtue is to be at odds with most of the world.”  Page ~145

“The gods have given men many good things, but there is no greater gift than friendship.” Page ~166

“It is not a thing one can fight, to see the best thing and yet follow the worse.” Page ~212

“The city that taught me to seek freedom has herself become a slave.” Page ~298

“The true victory is not to outlive one’s city but to remain worthy of it.” Page ~350

“The soul grows by its wounds.” Page ~372