The Praise Singer

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts.

Born into a stern farming family on the island of Keos, Simonides escapes his harsh childhood through a lucky apprenticeship with a renowned Ionian singer. As they travel through 5th century B.C. Greece, Simonides learns not only how to play the kithara and compose poetry, but also how to navigate the shifting alliances surrounding his rich patrons. He is witness to the Persian invasion of Ionia, to the decadent reign of the Samian pirate king Polykrates, and to the fall of the Pisistratids in show more the Athenian court. Along the way, he encounters artists, statesmen, athletes, thinkers, and lovers, including the likes of Pythagoras and Aischylos. Using the singer's unique perspective, Renault combines her vibrant imagination and her formidable knowledge of history to establish a sweeping, resilient vision of a golden century.

My Review: This book was a re-read, I feel sure, since I was hooked on her stuff in the Seventies...yet I felt curiously unfamiliar with the book. I recalled some scenes, such as Simonides returning from home to rejoin his master Kleobis in their Samian exile; I found a lot of the book to be less clear in my mind than most I've read before and choose to re-read.

I put this down to the fact that as I was reading it in 1978 or 1979, I was disappointed that the main character wasn't gay and wasn't even very excitingly drawn. (Can you tell I was a youth who loved the Alexander novels, The Bull from the Sea, The King Must Die, The Persian Boy? Especially The Persian Boy, quite salacious!)

But, in the end, as a fifty-year-old who's tastes have matured (ha), I liked this book quite a lot. It was a lovely tale of how the world has always judged others by their looks and not their deeds or talents. It presents itself as a harmless historical novel, and examines human nature minutely, unsparingly, and with what can only be called a jaundiced eye. Renault was clearly irritated at the follies of mankind. It shows in such lines as this, spoken by Simonides in his old age: "I have never desired young maids, preferrinig ripe fruit to green; maybe it is because I feared their laughter when I was a boy." (p262, Pantheon hardcover edition 1978)

Still scared of the masses. Still subject to the fears and foibles of youth. Wiser? Renault is too good a writer to make you take her view. She tells her story, and leaves you to take her meanings.

Sheer pleasure, friends, and all too seldom met, when a storyteller trusts you to read, and read again, and reach your own conclusions. Read it and conclude, and you won't be sorry.


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Renault has a beautiful way with descriptions of land and society, and effectively creates the social, political, and geographic climate of ancient Greece, particularly ancient Athens, in this novel. Her willingness to leave her hero in the dark is one of the ways she does this so effectively. As a poet, Simonides would have been hyperaware of the court's status, but not necessarily high enough to know all the secrets of the tyrants. It is this exchange of information, and the way Simonides collects and responds to this information, which make her rendition of the social setting so persuasive. The arc of Simonides' travel, which structures the book into sections by his geographic location, is also very effective, as the reader follows show more him in growing knowledge of the Athenian climate from his ignorant rural boyhood to favor and acceptance for his talent. show less

The Praise Singer is the story of Simonides, a great lyric poet who lived in sixth-century Greece. The novel is historical fiction, told in the first person, as an elderly Simonides looks back on his life and the tumultuous events of ancient Greece during his lifetime. I enjoyed the book and learned a lot about ancient Greek history and society. However, I feel like it would have been more interesting if I already had some knowledge of the time period. As I read the book, I became a little bored with the first person style. I felt like the narrator was telling the story to someone who already knew the people and events he was recounting. I also began to realize that it was a case of an unreliable narrator and that I would enjoy the show more story more from a character's perspective that was less naive about the political atmosphere surrounding him. However, this flaw is also the greatest strength in the novel. You learn a lot about Simonides from his interpretation of events. As the author begins to hint that he may not realize the whole story you see how his perspective changes and how he is eventually caught off guard by events. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in historical fiction or ancient Greece. show less

Simonides the poet and singer, born ill-favoured enough totempt his parents to exposing him, grows up with a love f poetry and song and manages to become aprenticed to a wandering poet, embarking on a journey around the Greek Isles, encountering other poets, athletes, Tyrants, warriors, and is on the sidelines of dramatic and bloody events. It's written with Renault's usual piercing beauty and rich powers of description and characterisation, while occasionaly drenching the whole thing in homoeroticism. It even has a well-developed female character, unusual for Renault's historical books. A lovely read.

This is not my absolute favorite Mary Renault - that would be The Persian Boy OF COURSE - but I give it five stars nonetheless because the worst book by Mary Renault is better than the best book of most writers. And The Praise Singer is definitely in the top tier of Renault's novels of ancient Greece.

Renault's imagined life of the poet Simonides begins with young Sim's wretched early days as a virtual slave in his harsh father's house. When Sim gathers enough courage to beg a traveling singer to apprentice him, his life takes a dramatic turn for the better; at last he is able to give voice to the words and music he has been hiding from his family. I like the small authentic details that Renault always brings to her historical fiction; show more she always provides the reader with a whole world to wander about in. And I like that she doesn't (in Josephine Tey's words) "write forsoothly;" her characters converse in modern English, with just the occasional soupcon of antiquity.

Unlike other Renault protagonists, Simonides is straight, not gay; I find that Renault is more skilled at creating romantic tension with her gay or bisexual characters. Still, Simonides' relationship with the beautiful hetaera Lyra is handled with grace and tenderness, and in any case, it is clear from the get-go that the poet's driving force is not love, but the quest for immortality through his art. A lovely novel. show less

I would give this six stars if I could -- utterly wonderful recreation of the life of a wandering poet in ancient Greece, just at the time the Persians were conquering the Ionians. It may flatter Simonides --who may have been more greedy and mercenary than this version -- but it does not see him as perfect --clearly he is very reluctant to see evil in the Pisistratids, and may be deceiving himself in acquitting them of the murder of Cimon . However, he does recognize how Hipparchus is gradually corrupted by his infatuation with Harmodius, and actually defies Hipparchus for humiliating Harmodius's sister. The story ends with the killing of Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogeiton and their deaths. There are a number of references forward show more to the Persian Wars, and I always wished Renault would do a sequel giving the wars as seen by Simonides (who wrote the epitaph for the Spartan dead at Theomopylae) but she never did, though she wrote an account of the war for children. show less

A typical Mary Renault. Ancient Greeks drily accept their circumstances and numerous barbaric cruelties, while staying pious somehow. A good re-telling of the events preceding the Persian Wars; the conquest of the Ionian cities by Cyrus, the death of Polykrates of Samos, the ascendancy of Pisistratus and the murder of his son, Hipparchos, who seems to have become very Nero-like to provoke the assassination. Simonides is telling the tale many years later while living in Sicily; every so often he like to remind us that a large part of the beautiful Athens he knew was burned by the Persians. For him there is no going back to those lyric days of yore.