The Mask of Apollo Author:Mary Renault An absorbing novel in which the author walks straight int o the brilliant, disillusioned Greece fo the 4th Century... and takes us with her. — This is history and Miss Renault makes us live in it. But she knows well that the life of Greece was not all power policitic and wars and tyrannies. It was poetry. It was sculpture and architecture. It was... more » philosophic thought. Therefore she chooses for her hero not a politician for an actor, Nikeratos.
Nikeratos tells his own story. By itself it is rich with character and incident and with that peculiar grace and charm and sweetness which is so essentially Greek. But it is interwoven with a larger story, the take of Dion, kinsman and minister of the tyrant of Syracuse. Intelligent, prooud, strong-willed, Dion is a friend of Plato, and for a time looked as though he might become the philospoher-king of whom Plato dreamed. He did not. Yet his failiure was mroe moving and dramatic than his success would have been.
This novel is recommended with compete confidence to all those tens of thousands of readers who were moved by THE KING MUST DIE and THE BULL FROM THE SEA.