My First History Teacher by Caroline Lawrence

The Last of the Wine

When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me.

So begins Mary Renault’s superb historical novel, The Last of the Wine, the book that changed my life. 

Until I read it, history had never captured my imagination the way some other subjects had, and certainly not the ancient history of the Greeks and Romans. 

Growing up in Bakersfield, California, I had brushes with the world of Classics: illustrated collections of the Greek Myths, my mother's glossy art books and the 1966 movie musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Aged 18 I even spent a few days in Rome and one magical afternoon in Ostia Antica.  

But none of those experiences ever tempted me away from the other worlds I longed to inhabit: the beatniky cool East Africa of Hatari!, the icy beauty of Dr Zhivago's Russia, the exciting universe of Star Trek. Because of those stories I threw myself into the study of animal behaviour, Russian and astronomy. But none of those disciplines took, and so the desire to inhabit those worlds gradually faded. 

Then, when I was 18 years old, on my gap year in Switzerland with a bad case of cabin fever, my parents sent two books as a kind of intellectual CARE package. Those two books that would alter the course of my life. 

The first book was The Iliad: the Penguin translation of E.V. Rieu. 

I had never read it before, and I loved it. What struck me most was that when the characters weren't battling or pillaging, they seemed quite modern. I remember being struck by one scene in particular, in which Hera and Athena have a chat on Mount Olympus. In E.V. Rieu’s wonderful translation, they seemed like women gossiping at the hairdresser's. I wondered how something composed so long ago could feel so relevant. 

The Iliad teased my brain, but the second book, The Last of the Wine, captured my heart. 

The story follows a young Athenian named Alexias as he grows up in Athens in the late fifth century BC. The book is mainly a love story, but during its course great events occur. Alexias meets Socrates, Plato and Xenophon. He campaigns against the Spartans, endures a siege, survives a famine, poses for a famous sculptor, runs the long race at Olympia and pursues a religious quest to Delphi. But he also engages in more mundane activities: like exercising at the palaestra, hunting boar, drinking at a symposium, going for walks with friends. 

We sat on the slab of the public rostrum, and looked across to the High City. The columns looked black against a thin green sky, and the lamps shone yellow in the shrines. There was a smell of dew on dust and on crushed leaves; the bats came out, and the grasshoppers. 

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tombs of the Kerameikos in Athens

It was compelling world and I longed to visit it. 

Katherine Langrish recently blogged about the amount of research Renault did in order to transport her reader to Classical Athens. The passage Kath quotes to illustrate her point is one of my favourites:

Our house stood in the Inner Kerameikos, not far from the Dipylon Gate. The courtyard had a little colonnade of painted columns, a fig tree and a vine…  

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Here is another one of my favourite passages: 

There had been snow in the night. It lay on the roof-tops, under a bright pure sky, thin, hard and glistening; whiter than the marble of Paros, whiter than our wedding robes. The lion-head rain spouts on the temple roofs had beards of crystal a cubit long; the red of baked clay looked dark and warm, and white plaster like curdled cream. Helios shone far off and high, giving no heat from the pale heaven, only the flash of his silver hair. When we led the bridegroom to the house of the bride, the lyre-strings snapped with the cold, and the flutes went flat; but we covered it with our singing.
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Caroline & "research assistant" in 2004

Not only does Mary Renault capture the smells, sights, tastes and sounds of fifth century BC Greece, she also gets into the mindset. She vividly paints a world where very few women have their own identity so a love affair has to be between men. A world where abstract ideas are as real as pebbles, or swords. A world where the Greek myths are intensely relevant because the gods are still worshipped.

Every sentence in The Last of the Wine is a gem. You can open the book at any point and find a wonderful expression, description or turn of phrase. Here is another one of my favourites:

My garland slipped back on my hair as I ran; he put up his hand to it, and it fell behind me. I could hear the vine shedding its last heavy drops upon the terrace; the croak of a frog at the cistern beyond; and my own heart beating. 

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When I got back to California after my gap year, I signed up to study Classics at U.C. Berkeley. I started learning Greek at the advanced age of 19 and Latin at 20. Learning these "dead languages" was both terrifying and fun. It was like breaking a giant code. And I discovered that the languages weren't dead. As I decoded the passages they revealed real flesh and blood people who had lived two thousand years ago. I found poets who made me blink back tears, young fogeys who made me snort, philosophers who confused me, historians who made me chuckle and gossip-mongers who had me running to my friends with details of a two thousand year old scandal. And it seemed inexhaustible. The deeper I delved, the more I loved it. 

Roman Mystery #10, set in Greece

Mary Renault had introduced me to a world I wanted to spend my life exploring. Since the moment I discovered her books, I have had part of my existence in the ancient world. After studying Classics at Berkeley and Cambridge, I taught Latin at a London primary school. And for nearly fifteen years I have been writing an ongoing series of Roman Mysteries books for kids. 

But I have also discovered other historical periods I love: Israel of the Old and New Testaments, the Napoleonic period as described in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series and the Wild West of Charles Portis's True Grit, which has sparked my second series of historical novels for kids. 

And this life-long love of other places in other periods all started with a novel written by an Englishwoman born in 1905, a woman I never met and of whose personal life I knew next to nothing: Mary Renault, my first real history teacher.