Bernard Dick traces Renault's novelistic technique to Herodotus, the fifth century B.C. military historian, chronicler, and ethnographer, who called his history "presentations of research."

Like Herodotus, Alexias and Renault's other narrators reconstruct their past in terms of their nation's history, reminiscing, digressing, and philosophizing, often passing aphoristic judgment on vital human issues, as does Lysis in The Last of the Wine: "A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better . . . Must we forsake the love of excellence, then, till every citizen feels it alike?"

Renault's love of excellence animates all of her Greek novels, perhaps most pervasively The Last of the Wine, and helps explain why so few historical novels can match its quality. That trap of historical novelists summed up by E. M. Forster's dismissal of Sir Walter Scott — "a trivial mind and a...