Renault's eight historical novels cover a range of time from the Greece of prehistory to the Hellenistic world the generation after Alexander the Great.

The King Must Die deals with the earliest of these eras. Theseus, portrayed as a real man in Mycenaean Greece, lives at a time when the matriarchal societies that worshipped a female deity were being overtaken by the patriarchal Dorians. This Theseus sails to Crete, conquering the labyrinth and slaying the minotaur. The novel provides rational explanations for mythological elements that would delight the original rationalist, Euhemerus. Its sequel, The Bull from the Sea, tells the story of Theseus from his return to Athens until his death; in the process Renault also tells the stories of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, the centaurs, Oedipus, Phaedra, and Theseus' son Hippolytus.

The Praise Singer, a first-person account narrated by the poet Simonides, presents the events...