Bagoas' narration provides both a Persian view of the conquest and an intimate look at the personality of the conqueror. The Persian Boy is a 1972 historical novel written by Mary Renault and narrated by Bagoas, a young Persian from an aristocratic family who is captured by his father's enemies, castrated, and sold as a slave to the king Darius III, who makes him his favorite.Įventually he becomes the lover and most faithful servant of Alexander the Great, who overthrew Darius and captured the Persian Empire. The Persian Boy (Alexander the Great #1), Mary Renault until 1959, after the success of The Last of the Wine proved that American readers and critics would accept a serious gay love story.
The Charioteer could not be published in the U.S. Instead she was free to focus on larger ethical and philosophical concerns, while examining the nature of love and leadership. By turning away from the 20th century and focusing on stories about male lovers in the warrior societies of ancient Greece, Renault no longer had to deal with homosexuality and anti-gay prejudice as social "problems". In a sense, The Charioteer (1953), the story of two young gay servicemen in the 1940s who try to model their relationship on the ideals expressed in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, is a warm-up for Renault's historical novels. They include a pair of novels about the mythological hero Theseus and a trilogy about the career of Alexander the Great. Her historical novels are all set in ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander. Mary Renault was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece.
Seeing them in all the imaginative richness of detail with which Miss Renault presents them, one feels that here, as in her other classical novels, she has arrived intuitively at the truth. adrift from the court of the dead Persian King Darius, is taken into Alexander's household and becomes his favourite attendant.ĭespite the vicissitudes of his campaigns, his two marriages, and his loyalty to his boyhood friend Hephaistion, Alexander bestows an enduring affection and trust upon Bagoas, who, braving the resentment of the victorious Macedonians, fosters the young conqueror's growing sympathy with his Persian subjects, and confronts him in the isolation of his genius.īagoas is a real historical person, and one who may well have influenced the great events described. The narrator of his brilliant and sometimes tragic career is Bagoas, a young Persian of celebrated beauty who. This second book in Renault's Alexander series tells the extraordinary but true story of Alexander The Great's last seven years, during which, before his death at thirty-two, he carried his conquests the eastern end of the known world.
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