Best known for her historical novels--The Last of the Wine (1956), The King Must Die (1958), The Bull from the Sea (1962), The Mask of Apollo (1966), and Fire from Heaven (1969)--Mary Renault's works have often appeared to readers as collateral reading to Greek literature. She is, doubtless, one of the most creative historical novelists of our era and the only bona fide Hellenist in twentieth-century fiction. What...