Despite her bibliographies and factual afterwords, Miss Renault setting out to re-create a Greek reality isn't your ordinary taxidermist, intent on matching the colors of the glass eyes. No, she's a male impersonator….

Classical Greece, where homoerotic relations were unencumbered by moral disesteem, has set her imagination free repeatedly….

Part of [the] secret [of "The King Must Die"] is that Miss Renault varied the formula. Dispensing with [her main persona], she made her Ralph-figure, Theseus, the protagonist and first-person reminiscer…. Part of it is the fructive ambiguity of legend. Theseus … doesn't hamper with historicity the way Plato or Alcibiades do, and it's possible for the novelist to enchant with guesses at the kind of real events that might have turned into the legends we have.

But the book's chief secret is the way the author's feelings have responded to the opportunities of a world so strange she feels...