The athletes are ready, the teams are set, and the Seine is ( ) swimmable: the Summer Olympics are upon us at last! As we enjoy this quadrennial banquet of sporting prowess, we’ll have ample opportunity to marvel at the collective magnificence of all those athletes who have pushed themselves far beyond the bounds of what ought to be humanly possible. But for the literary-minded sports fan, this is also as good a time as ever to appreciate how the beauty of the Olympics has made its way into the world of writing. The Olympics lend themselves particularly well to poetry: there are the motivational metaphors of Alberto Ríos’ “ ,” the lyrical tributes of Maya Angelou’s “ ,” and the countless forgotten odes from the era when .
Fiction, too, has an affinity for the Olympics, and the list of must-read Olympic novels includes stirring psychodramas such as Chris Cleave’s (a character study of two cycling rivals in the lead-up to London 2012) as well as sweeping romances such as Frank Deford’s (a saga of forbidden love amidst the uncertainties of Berlin 1936). As it happens, though, the Olympic novel that just might be the greatest of all time isn’t even a conventional Olympic novel at all. Mary Renault’s , published in 1956, is stunning in its scope and near-perfect in its execution.
A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War, the novel centers on the life and upbringing of Alexias, an Athenian of noble birth who must find his own s.