The Mask of Apollo
What is the setting in the novel, The Mask of Apollo?
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The novel is set in the middle decades of the fourth century B.C., Athenian society was in eclipse. The protracted Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), which the Greek historian Thucydides chronicled, had taken a terrible toll in moral, social, political, and economic terms. Nikeratos, the narrator of The Mask of Apollo, records the decline of the theater; he also records the failure of Plato to train a philosopher-king and the failure of Dion to become one. The novel presents many aspects of Greek life: the internal workings and traditions of the classical theater, the festival of the Olympic games, the life of Plato's Academy, the dissolute courts of the tyrants Dionysius I and his son, and the world of the Pythagoreans in Italy. Much of the action takes place in Syracuse and Sicily.
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