The athletes are ready, the teams are set, and the Seine is (maybe) swimmable: the Summer Olympics are upon us at last! As we enjoy this quadrennial banquet of sporting prowess, we’ll have ample opportunity to marvel at the collective magnificence of all those athletes who have pushed themselves far beyond the bounds of what ought to be humanly possible. But for the literary-minded sports fan, this is also as good a time as ever to appreciate how the beauty of the Olympics has made its way into the world of writing.
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The Olympics lend themselves particularly well to poetry: there are the motivational metaphors of Alberto Ríos’ “Taking Your Olympic Measure,” the lyrical tributes of Maya Angelou’s “Amazement Awaits,” and the countless forgotten odes from the era when poetry was actually an official Olympic event. Fiction, too, has an affinity for the Olympics, and the list of must-read Olympic novels includes stirring psychodramas such as Chris Cleave’s Gold (a character study of two cycling rivals in the lead-up to London 2012) as well as sweeping romances such as Frank Deford’s Bliss, Remembered (a saga of forbidden love amidst the uncertainties of Berlin 1936). As it happens, though, the Olympic novel that just might be the greatest of all time isn’t even a conventional Olympic novel at all.
Renault’s capacity for inhabiting the ancient Greek psyche confronts the contemporary reader with a sporting philosophy that is at once instantly recognizable and utterly foreign.
Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, published in 1956, is stunning in its scope and near-perfect in its execution. A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War, the novel centers on the life and upbringing of Alexias, an Athenian of noble birth who must find his own sense of self while navigating the sociopolitical upheavals of his time. Much of the plot is driven by Alexias’ evolving relationship with his mentor-cum-lover Lysis—a relationship portrayed, as Miranda Carter notes, in a way that “was decades ahead of its time and is strikingly similar to the [current scholarly] view of ancient Greek sexuality.”
Together, in their journeys through the thrilling and tumultuous environs of fifth-century BCE Athens, Alexias and Lysis encounter a cavalcade of the period’s most notable figures and events: they are taken in by Socrates and his philosophical circle; they wait with bated breath for news from the disastrous Sicilian Expedition; they play minor roles in major battles under the command of the wily general Alcibiades. It is a tale of almost Forrest Gumpian proportions, if Forrest Gump had been drinking symposium wine instead of eating store-bought chocolates.
But what does any of this have to do with the Olympics? Well, Alexias and Lysis are coming of age in ancient Greece, so athletics are naturally involved. Both protagonists distinguish themselves as promising athletes—Alexias as a runner, Lysis in the no-holds-barred bloodsport of the pankration—and their careers blossom from their early days at the local palaestra to the elite heights of sporting competition.
Midway through the novel, Alexias and Lysis are selected to represent Athens at the Isthmian Games, one of the four prestigious sets of Panhellenic Games (the rough equivalent, in ancient Greek terms, of a world championship). For Alexias, this debut on the Panhellenic stage is a stepping stone to his ultimate goal of Olympic glory. We have learned on the novel’s second page that his grandfather, who died in the Great Plague of Athens just before Alexias was born, was a former Olympic runner (“buried with his old trophies and his olive crown”), and it seems like Alexias might have what it takes to follow in these famous footsteps.
Alexias wins his event at the Isthmian Games, but he later watches helplessly as Lysis suffers a gruesome injury in the pankration. Back home in Athens, Alexias consults with the priest of Asclepius, god of medicine, and is advised to give up his training for the Olympics because such an extreme regimen might exacerbate his own underlying heart condition. (“Your heart is too great for your body, Alexias. That is the message of the god.”) So Alexias heeds the god’s message, and, with admirable equanimity, he allows his Olympic aspirations to fade quietly into the past.
Alexias is a universal sporting figure—and yet, because he is simultaneously Renault’s creation, he is also a unique one.
In the paeans of her countless admirers (among them, lifelong devotee Daniel Mendelsohn), Mary Renault has been rightly celebrated for many of her authorial gifts—her inborn understanding of classical Greece, her courageous rendering of gay love, her seamless blending of the ancient and the autofictional. But she has rarely, if ever, been given due credit for her skill as a sportswriter. And what an oversight that is, because Renault’s depiction of athletics in The Last of the Wine is as gripping and perceptive as such depictions come. Her blow-by-blow narration of Lysis’ doomed pankration bout at the Isthmian Games conjures up all the intimate violence of combat sport, from our first glimpse of Lysis’ opponent with “great muscles like twisted oakwood gnarling his body and arms” to the parting image of Lysis’ fragile hand that “lay, palm up, in the dust” as “the blood-voices cheered” in the tight-packed crowd.
Elsewhere, Renault’s capacity for inhabiting the ancient Greek psyche confronts the contemporary reader with a sporting philosophy that is at once instantly recognizable and utterly foreign. George Orwell’s description of sport as “war minus the shooting” meets the Delphic maxim of “nothing in excess” when Alexias remarks judgmentally that he “cannot bear to see a runner gone all to legs, looking as if he would be fit for nothing, when off the track, except to get away from a battlefield faster than everyone else.”
The novel’s most poignant rumination on athletics, however, comes just after Alexias decides to listen to the priest and give up his Olympic dream. For a brief moment in the text, Alexias the character becomes Alexias the narrator, now as a much older man looking back on his bygone youth. “This, then,” recounts Alexias,
is why I ceased to run the long-race. The time is coming, I daresay, when I shall pay the price for my old crowns; since I turned fifty, after a climb or a hard ride, I have felt again the arrow of Far-Shooting Apollo prick my breast. So I set things down while I remember them.
What former athlete does not recognize himself in the aged Alexias? Who within that infinite phalanx of erstwhile sportsmen does not feel as Alexias feels, proudly reminiscing on his heyday even as he suffers its bodily toll in the present? Speaking to us from the deep Hellenic past, Alexias is a universal sporting figure—and yet, because he is simultaneously Renault’s creation, he is also a unique one. Alexias is afforded the special ability, through Renault’s pen and his own stylus, of understanding himself in exactly the language of Renault’s genius: in the act of writing, of setting things down, of making sport immortal by endowing it with words.
This summer, more than two millennia after Alexias was in his physical prime, the best athletes of today’s world converge upon Paris. These modern heroes are genuine Olympians, which means that each of them has already fulfilled the great dream that Alexias could not. But Alexias probably has them all beat where it counts—after all, how many athletes have had their life story set down by a writer as peerless as Mary Renault?