{"product_id":"the-king-must-die-the-bull-from-the-sea-isbn-9780593535639","title":"The King Must Die; The Bull from the Sea","description":"\u003cb\u003eA hardcover omnibus edition of the two classic novels in which Mary Renault brilliantly recreated the legendary hero Theseus and his defeat of the Minotaur. CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her inventive novels of ancient Greece, Mary Renault performs the alchemical feats of fashioning from the myth of Theseus a convincingly flawed hero and of weaving a thrillingly plausible account of the events that inspired the fantastical tale of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe King Must Die \u003c\/i\u003efollows young Theseus from his mystery-shrouded birth and youthful insecurity about his small size, through his growing strength and ingenuity to a dawning belief in his destiny. When teenaged Theseus sets out to join his true father, the King of Athens, he is delayed by unforeseen adventures: first by a perilous forced sojourn in the matriarchal society of Eleusis and next when he volunteers to join the annual tribute of Athenian youths sent to be sacrificed to a bull-worshipping cult on the island of Crete. Once trapped in the labyrinthine palace of King Minos, Theseus enlists the help of the high priestess Ariadne in a daring plan to free the Athenians forever from the dominance of Crete. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Bull from the Sea \u003c\/i\u003ebegins after Theseus’s triumphal return to Athens, where he finds that his father has died and he is now king. But his confidence in his divinely ordained destiny will be shaken by the adventures yet ahead of him: a life-changing encounter with Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons; the birth of a son who will insist on choosing his own path; and the tragic results of his wife Phaedra’s treachery. Combining her deep understanding of the cultures of the ancient Greek world with inspired speculation, Renault brings the heroes and monsters of legend enthrallingly to life.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eEveryman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.“Renault’s historical novels...are among the finest ever written.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A remarkable accomplishment.... Pure fictional gold.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia Inquirer\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Excellent entertainment.... What Renault has done, and done with consummate beauty, is to breathe life and light into the faces of heroic personages.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003eMARY RENAULT (1905–1983) was the author of more than a dozen novels. She was born in London, educated at Oxford, and trained as a nurse. After World War II she and her life partner, Julie Mullard, settled in South Africa and traveled widely in Africa and Greece. This was when she began writing her historical novels, including \u003ci\u003eThe King Must Die\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Last of the Wine\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Persian Boy\u003c\/i\u003e, and a biography of Alexander the Great, \u003ci\u003eThe Nature of Alexander\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Introducer: \u003c\/b\u003eDANIEL MENDELSOHN is a frequent contributor to \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books.\u003c\/i\u003e His books include the international best seller \u003ci\u003eThe Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,\u003c\/i\u003e winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; a memoir, \u003ci\u003eThe Elusive Embrace,\u003c\/i\u003e a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Book and a \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e Best Book of the Year; and \u003ci\u003eAn Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic. \u003c\/i\u003eHe is the author of the definitive English translation of the \u003ci\u003eComplete Poems\u003c\/i\u003e of C. P. Cavafy and of two collections of essays\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e He teaches literature at Bard College.from the INTRODUCTION by Daniel Mendelsohn\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen, in the middle of the 1950s, Mary Renault sat down to\u003cbr\u003e write \u003ci\u003eThe King Must Die\u003c\/i\u003e, her novelistic retelling of the myth of the\u003cbr\u003e Athenian hero Theseus, she was facing a challenge unlike any\u003cbr\u003e other she had previously set herself.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Nothing that Renault had done before that decade suggested\u003cbr\u003e that she would become one of the twentieth century’s most\u003cbr\u003e esteemed authors of historical fiction, whose novels of Ancient\u003cbr\u003e Greece, admired for both their scholarly rigor and literary texture,\u003cbr\u003e would sell millions of copies worldwide. Between the late\u003cbr\u003e Thirties and mid-Fifties, the author – who was born in London\u003cbr\u003e in 1905 and emigrated to South Africa after World War II –\u003cbr\u003e had published a number of crisply intelligent contemporary love\u003cbr\u003e stories with trenchant themes, among which the most persistent\u003cbr\u003e was the conflict between individual choice and personal happiness,\u003cbr\u003e on the one hand, and social conventions and historical\u003cbr\u003e circumstances, on the other. This theme was, perhaps, inevitable.\u003cbr\u003e Renault was a lesbian; two of her contemporary novels,\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Friendly Young Ladies\u003c\/i\u003e, published in 1943, and \u003ci\u003eThe Charioteer\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003cbr\u003e which came out a decade later, treat the subject of homosexuality\u003cbr\u003e explicitly.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Despite a lifelong fascination with all phases of the Greek\u003cbr\u003e past – by the time she finished high school she had read all of\u003cbr\u003e Plato, and during her university days at Oxford she repeatedly\u003cbr\u003e visited the Ashmolean to gaze at a statuette of a Minoan bulldancer\u003cbr\u003e – Renault was nearing fifty by the time she decided to set\u003cbr\u003e a novel in Ancient Greece. The inspiration, she later recalled,\u003cbr\u003e came during a boat trip she took along the East African coast in\u003cbr\u003e the early 1950s with her partner, Julie Mullard. She was reading\u003cbr\u003e the Greek historian Xenophon’s memoir of his days as a pupil of\u003cbr\u003e Socrates, and the book sparked her curiosity about the members\u003cbr\u003e of Socrates’ circle and their individual characters. “What must\u003cbr\u003e it have been like?” she remembered wondering. “And I thought\u003cbr\u003e I must write a book about it.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The result of that spur to her imagination was the publication, \u003cbr\u003e A portrait of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, in the latter\u003cbr\u003e part of the 400s BCE, the book, cast as the memoir of an (invented)\u003cbr\u003e student of Socrates, moved easily between grand historical\u003cbr\u003e set pieces and lively recreations of Socrates’ dialogues, the\u003cbr\u003e whole being enlivened by a love story between the narrator and\u003cbr\u003e another young man. (By setting her fictions in Ancient Greece,\u003cbr\u003e a society in which male–male relationships were an accepted\u003cbr\u003e convention, Renault was finally able to write about homosexuality\u003cbr\u003e in a context that required neither excuses nor justifications.)\u003cbr\u003e The novel was an enormous success both critically and commercially;\u003cbr\u003e Renault’s attention to fi ne-grained historical detail won\u003cbr\u003e her the admiration not only of other serious historical novelists\u003cbr\u003e – Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Aubrey–Maturin novels,\u003cbr\u003e dedicated one of them to her – but of classical scholars, too. To\u003cbr\u003e her immense research Renault brought something that most historians\u003cbr\u003e don’t have: a novelist’s imagination and an intuitive feel\u003cbr\u003e for the kind of detail that conveys, more than even the most solid\u003cbr\u003e facts can, the vivid reality of characters and settings. She went as\u003cbr\u003e far as to reproduce, in her prose, the syntax of Classical Greek,\u003cbr\u003e which is heavy with participles. “He, hearing that a youth called\u003cbr\u003e Philon, with whom he was in love, had been taken sick, went at\u003cbr\u003e once to him; meeting, I have been told, not only the slaves but\u003cbr\u003e the boy’s own sister, running the other way.” Such minute attention\u003cbr\u003e to stylistic detail gives the novel the impression of having\u003cbr\u003e been translated from some lost Greek original.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e For the quarter century following the publication of \u003ci\u003eThe Last\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eof the Wine\u003c\/i\u003e, Renault produced a steady stream of critically acclaimed\u003cbr\u003e and bestselling fictional evocations of Greek antiquity.\u003cbr\u003e Like \u003ci\u003eThe Last of the Wine \u003c\/i\u003e– and as with the classically-themed\u003cbr\u003e novels of Renault’s contemporaries Marguerite Yourcenar (\u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eMemoirs of Hadrian\u003c\/i\u003e) and Robert Graves (\u003ci\u003eI, Claudius\u003c\/i\u003e), authors to\u003cbr\u003e whom she was often compared – these novels often took the\u003cbr\u003e form of first-person narratives by either real or invented figures,\u003cbr\u003e a technique that efficiently drew modern readers into remote\u003cbr\u003e times and milieus. \u003ci\u003eThe Mask of Apollo \u003c\/i\u003e(1966), told from the point\u003cbr\u003e of view of an Athenian actor who gets mixed up in political intrigues\u003cbr\u003e surrounding Plato between the 380s and the 350s BCE,\u003cbr\u003e gave Renault a vehicle for expressing what her biographer,\u003cbr\u003e David Sweetman, called a “lifelong passion” for the theater;\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Praise Singer \u003c\/i\u003e(1978), narrated by the sixth-century BCE poet\u003cbr\u003e Simonides of Ceos, is set at the moment when Athens overthrew\u003cbr\u003e her tyrants and established the democracy. Perhaps her best-known\u003cbr\u003e work is a trilogy of novels about Alexander the Great: \u003ci\u003eFire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003efrom Heaven \u003c\/i\u003e(1969), \u003ci\u003eThe Persian Boy \u003c\/i\u003e(1972), and \u003ci\u003eFuneral Games \u003c\/i\u003e(1981).\u003cbr\u003e The second of these is narrated by a figure who appears at the\u003cbr\u003e margins of ancient biographies of Alexander, a Persian eunuch\u003cbr\u003e who had been the pleasure-boy of the emperor Darius III, and\u003cbr\u003e who, after Alexander’s victory over the Persians, became the\u003cbr\u003e lover of the Macedonian conqueror. By narrating Alexander’s\u003cbr\u003e conquests through the eyes of someone from another culture,\u003cbr\u003e Renault allows us to see this familiar figure afresh.\u003cbr\u003e All that, however, was far in the future when Renault began\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe King Must Die\u003c\/i\u003e. The daunting challenge posed by the new\u003cbr\u003e book was quite different from the one she had faced in writing\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Last of the Wine\u003c\/i\u003e. In that book, she had had to use her imaginative\u003cbr\u003e skills to put flesh and bones on historical events that\u003cbr\u003e had been recorded and elaborated by a hundred generations\u003cbr\u003e of historians, starting with the classic accounts of Thucydides\u003cbr\u003e and Xenophon, both of whom were eyewitnesses to many of the\u003cbr\u003e events of the Peloponnesian War. With Theseus, she faced, in\u003cbr\u003e a way, the opposite problem: she had to find a way to ground\u003cbr\u003e the fantastical flights of myth so that her legendary character\u003cbr\u003e and his remarkable doings would feel historical – would feel,\u003cbr\u003e somehow, real.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e For Renault, Theseus, the legendary hero-king of Athens\u003cbr\u003e who freed the city from servitude to its Cretan overlords, was\u003cbr\u003e a natural choice of protagonist. Throughout her life, the author\u003cbr\u003e idolized and identified with boyish adventure heroes with interesting\u003cbr\u003e flaws, an identification that found fullest expression in her\u003cbr\u003e trilogy about Alexander. (She remarked that, while writing the\u003cbr\u003e second volume, she felt that she had become one with her protagonist.)\u003cbr\u003e There was, too, that fascination with the civilization of\u003cbr\u003e Minoan Crete going back to her Oxford days. And Renault had\u003cbr\u003e great feeling as well for the culture of Athens, the ancient city-state\u003cbr\u003e that provided the setting for many of her novels. Theseus,\u003cbr\u003e the Athenian hero \u003ci\u003epar excellence\u003c\/i\u003e, who famously penetrated the\u003cbr\u003e secrets of the Labyrinth to slay the Minotaur, exemplified the virtues\u003cbr\u003e which that city claimed for itself (bravery, glamor, sympathy\u003cbr\u003e for the oppressed) as well as its vices (a tendency to nudge itself\u003cbr\u003e into others’ business, known as \u003ci\u003epolypragmosyne¯\u003c\/i\u003e, “busybodiness,”\u003cbr\u003e and a taste for troublemaking). Already in the \u003ci\u003eIliad\u003c\/i\u003e, a character\u003cbr\u003e recalls Theseus as belonging to an earlier generation of heroes,\u003cbr\u003e “the strongest ever bred”; he appears in a number of Greek\u003cbr\u003e tragedies as a ruler who embodies the city’s noblest traits, showing\u003cbr\u003e kindness even to the aged, accursed Oedipus in Sophocles’\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eOedipus at Colonus \u003c\/i\u003eand defending the rights of the mothers and\u003cbr\u003e widows of defeated soldiers in Euripides’ \u003ci\u003eSuppliant Women\u003c\/i\u003e. Later\u003cbr\u003e mythographers, those ancient Greek and Roman collectors of\u003cbr\u003e and commentators on the old tales, were aware of a number of\u003cbr\u003e accounts of the hero’s life now lost to us; fortunately Plutarch,\u003cbr\u003e who flourished late in the first century CE and wrote a \u003ci\u003eLife of\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eTheseus\u003c\/i\u003e, had access to these. His account is the basis for much of\u003cbr\u003e Renault’s narrative in both \u003ci\u003eThe King Must Die \u003c\/i\u003eand its sequel, \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eBull from the Sea\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e An astonishing range of stories covered the whole of the hero’s\u003cbr\u003e life. He was said to have been simultaneously the son of Aegeus,\u003cbr\u003e a king of Athens’ most ancient royal line, the Erechtheids, and\u003cbr\u003e the son of the sea-god Poseidon himself. (His mother, Aethra,\u003cbr\u003e princess of the nearby city of Troizen, slept with both on a\u003cbr\u003e single night.) A series of tales, reminiscent of those told of the\u003cbr\u003e young King Arthur, recounted how he proved his paternity as\u003cbr\u003e a youth by digging up certain tokens left in a secret place by\u003cbr\u003e his mortal father, whose court in Athens then accepted him as\u003cbr\u003e heir. (By this point Aegeus has taken as his mistress none other\u003cbr\u003e than Medea, who makes a fascinating cameo appearance in\u003cbr\u003e the fi rst of Renault’s Theseus novels.) To the young prince was\u003cbr\u003e attributed an expansion and consolidation of Athenian power\u003cbr\u003e and the establishment of law and justice throughout Attica, the\u003cbr\u003e region around the city, which he brought under a single coherent\u003cbr\u003e rule. Many of the myths about him indeed celebrated exploits\u003cbr\u003e by which he rid his kingdom of various kinds of predator both\u003cbr\u003e human and animal: the bandit Periphetes, who murdered his\u003cbr\u003e victims with a huge club which later became Theseus’ own\u003cbr\u003e emblem, often depicted in the visual arts; an enormous sow that\u003cbr\u003e terrorized a district called Crommyon; and so forth.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe King Must Die \u003c\/i\u003ecovers much of this material, all leading\u003cbr\u003e up to a climactic retelling of the most famous of Theseus’ early\u003cbr\u003e exploits: his journey to Crete and his slaying there of the Minotaur,\u003cbr\u003e the half-human, half-taurine monster who dwelled at the\u003cbr\u003e heart of the Labyrinth, the maze designed by the great inventor\u003cbr\u003e Daedalus. In the myth, the young prince goes to Crete as part\u003cbr\u003e of the periodic tribute of seven youths and seven virgins that\u003cbr\u003e Athens had to provide to her overlords: on arrival, the boys and\u003cbr\u003e girls would be devoured by the monster. But Theseus wins the\u003cbr\u003e heart of the Cretan princess Ariadne, daughter of King Minos,\u003cbr\u003e who helps her lover to kill the Minotaur by threading a string\u003cbr\u003e through the maze that leads to the monster’s lair.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Behind these and other myths about the hero’s youth, it is\u003cbr\u003e possible to discern the dim outlines of real historical events.\u003cbr\u003e Scholars today believe that Theseus might be based on a\u003cbr\u003e memory of a heroic ruler (again, like King Arthur) who lived at\u003cbr\u003e the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE, when the palace\u003cbr\u003e cultures of Mycenae and Minoan Crete collapsed, and who rid\u003cbr\u003e the land of bandits and villains and established a remote ancestor\u003cbr\u003e of the historical city. (The political consolidation of Athens\u003cbr\u003e with neighboring territories that was attributed to Theseus was\u003cbr\u003e known as the \u003ci\u003esynoikismos\u003c\/i\u003e; it was celebrated in classical times at\u003cbr\u003e a grand annual festival known as the \u003ci\u003eSynoikia\u003c\/i\u003e.) In \u003ci\u003eThe King Must\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eDie\u003c\/i\u003e, Renault assumes the truth of that hypothesis: her Theseus\u003cbr\u003e is an ambitious young prince who, whatever his secret dreams of\u003cbr\u003e being Poseidon’s son, has a pragmatic political mind.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e To underpin this realistic presentation of her hero, the author\u003cbr\u003e found a number of ingenious ways to account for some of the\u003cbr\u003e more fantastical elements of the myth, suggesting how real-life\u003cbr\u003e details might have grown into the exaggerations of legend. In\u003cbr\u003e her novel, there is no half-human, half-bull Minotaur: we learn\u003cbr\u003e that the Cretan king wears a ceremonial bull’s-head mask, and\u003cbr\u003e that “Minotaur” is a ritual title given to the crown prince – in\u003cbr\u003e the novel, an illegitimate son of Minos’ queen who is eyeing the\u003cbr\u003e throne himself, and whose looks have something bullish about\u003cbr\u003e them. (“He was very dark . . . greenish-dark like the ripe olive;\u003cbr\u003e and as thick as a bullock. His neck was no narrower than his\u003cbr\u003e head . . . his nose was broad, with wide black nostrils.”) And\u003cbr\u003e Renault, following a number of scholars, suggests that the annual\u003cbr\u003e tribute of youths and maidens from Crete’s vassal-states is intended\u003cbr\u003e to “feed the monster” not literally but figuratively: that\u003cbr\u003e is, to supply fresh athletes for the bull-dance, the sport – part\u003cbr\u003e entertainment, part ritual – depicted on the walls of the palace\u003cbr\u003e of Knossos, where brilliantly-colored paintings show athletes\u003cbr\u003e who are at once \u003ci\u003etoreros \u003c\/i\u003eand acrobats somersaulting and vaulting\u003cbr\u003e off the backs of charging bulls. The statuette Renault visited as\u003cbr\u003e an undergraduate was of one such dancer.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The myths of Theseus’ early life end, as does \u003ci\u003eThe King Must\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eDie\u003c\/i\u003e, with the triumphant hero’s return home. After Theseus\u003cbr\u003e has slain the Minotaur, he and his band sail for Athens, where\u003cbr\u003e his father, the elderly Aegeus, anxiously scans the horizon: for,\u003cbr\u003e on departing, Theseus had promised that, if he survived his\u003cbr\u003e Cretan ordeal, his ship would run down its black sail and hoist\u003cbr\u003e a white sail meant to symbolize life. Stopping first on the island\u003cbr\u003e of Naxos, where Theseus abandons Ariadne (who goes on to\u003cbr\u003e become the bride of the wine-god, Dionysus), the young prince\u003cbr\u003e sails into Attic waters – forgetting, however, to change his sail.\u003cbr\u003e Thinking that his son has died, Aegeus jumps into the sea from\u003cbr\u003e the promontory of Cape Sounion, and Theseus enters Athens\u003cbr\u003e as king.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Bull from the Sea\u003c\/i\u003e, published in 1962, covers a number\u003cbr\u003e of incidents from Theseus’ later life as king of Athens. These\u003cbr\u003e tales, while all exemplifying the hero’s valor and dash, are more\u003cbr\u003e varied and harder to tie into a single theme or narrative trajectory.\u003cbr\u003e (Most critics agree that \u003ci\u003eThe King Must Die \u003c\/i\u003eis the stronger\u003cbr\u003e of the two novels.) There is Theseus’ slaying of the gruesome\u003cbr\u003e villain Procrustes (from whom we have our adjective “procrustean”:\u003cbr\u003e he notoriously forced his victims to fi t into his guest-bed\u003cbr\u003e by either stretching them out, if they were too short, or amputating\u003cbr\u003e their extremities, if they were too tall); his trip to Pontus,\u003cbr\u003e on the southern shore of the Black Sea, where he conquers the\u003cbr\u003e warrior-women known as Amazons and wins their queen, Hippolyta,\u003cbr\u003e who bears him a son, Hippolytus; his great friendship\u003cbr\u003e with Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, at whose wedding the half-human,\u003cbr\u003e half-horse Centaurs get drunk and attempt to rape the\u003cbr\u003e bride, wreaking havoc on their hosts before the Lapiths, led by\u003cbr\u003e Pirithous, Theseus and – in Renault’s account – Hippolyta,\u003cbr\u003e slaughter them. (The battle is commemorated in the sculptural\u003cbr\u003e decoration of that greatest of all Athenian buildings, the Parthenon.)\u003cbr\u003e In these episodes, as elsewhere, Renault, while sensitive\u003cbr\u003e to the eerie, god-inhabited thought-world of her characters, finds\u003cbr\u003e a way to account naturally for the myths’ wilder elements: the\u003cbr\u003e Centaurs, for instance, are no more than a particularly hirsute\u003cbr\u003e tribe with a penchant for riding very shaggy ponies into whose\u003cbr\u003e thick coats the riders’ legs disappear, making it seem as if rider\u003cbr\u003e and mount were one being.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The centerpiece of \u003ci\u003eThe Bull from the Sea \u003c\/i\u003eis its adaptation of\u003cbr\u003e a well-known tragic tale that was made famous fi rst in Euripides’\u003cbr\u003e drama \u003ci\u003eHippolytus \u003c\/i\u003eand, millennia later, in Racine’s \u003ci\u003ePhèdre\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003cbr\u003e Theseus’ queen Phaedra, the forsaken Ariadne’s younger sister,\u003cbr\u003e conceives an illicit passion for his son Hippolytus. In the Greek\u003cbr\u003e version of this familiar folk-tale motif – one thinks of the biblical\u003cbr\u003e story of Potiphar’s wife – the young Hippolytus, who has dedicated\u003cbr\u003e himself to the chaste cult of the virgin huntress Artemis,\u003cbr\u003e rejects the advances of the older woman, who in her rage and\u003cbr\u003e shame accuses him of having raped her. Euripides’ version adds\u003cbr\u003e an anguishing twist: his Hippolytus has taken an oath never to\u003cbr\u003e reveal what transpired between him and his stepmother, and\u003cbr\u003e hence is unable to defend himself when he is confronted by his\u003cbr\u003e enraged father. Convinced of his son’s guilt, Theseus calls upon\u003cbr\u003e Poseidon to curse Hippolytus, and the youth is killed after his\u003cbr\u003e chariot crashes, an accident caused when a giant bull, hurled\u003cbr\u003e onto shore by the crest of a wave sent by the sea-god, terrifies\u003cbr\u003e his horses. Only too late does Theseus learn the truth. In the\u003cbr\u003e plays of both the Greek and French dramatists, the focus is on\u003cbr\u003e the erotically possessed Phaedra and the conflict between her\u003cbr\u003e lust and her shame, and Theseus is a minor character. Readers\u003cbr\u003e familiar with those versions will be fascinated by Renault’s\u003cbr\u003e hand ling of the story, in which we experience the drama from\u003cbr\u003e the wrenching perspective of the uncomprehending king.\u003cbr\u003e After losing his wife and son, Renault writes in a postscript to\u003cbr\u003e these novels, “Theseus’ luck forsook him.” Eventually, the aged\u003cbr\u003e king leaves the city that he made great and takes refuge on the\u003cbr\u003e island of Skyros. In most versions of the myth, he dies, like his\u003cbr\u003e father, in a fall from a cliff – either an accident or through the\u003cbr\u003e perfidy of his host. Either way, an inglorious end to an astonishing\u003cbr\u003e career.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The achievement of Renault’s novels is to have taken this grab-bag\u003cbr\u003e of legends and fashioned from them a coherent narrative\u003cbr\u003e and a convincing work of fiction – to have excavated, as she puts\u003cbr\u003e it in her Author’s Note, the “human actualities” beneath the\u003cbr\u003e “fairy tale gloss.”\u003cbr\u003e . . . \u003cbr\u003e *","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300136341733,"sku":"NP9780593535639","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593535639.jpg?v=1767740052","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-king-must-die-the-bull-from-the-sea-isbn-9780593535639","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}