Recensione in Italiano: QUI.
Hello everyone, I’m Elena and thank you for being on Alessandro III di Macedonia – your resource on Alexander the Great and Hellenism! I still remember the euphoria I felt while writing, a little over two years ago, the article Notizia bomba! A fine mese uscirà la trilogia di Mary Renault in italiano! because finally a trilogy that I had wanted to read for a long time was about to be published in Italian, which is considered by many to be the most beautiful dedicated to my beloved Alexander and I couldn’t understand why Italian publishers hadn’t published it yet. I couldn’t believe that Mary Renault’s trilogy on Alexander the Great was about to be published in Italian! But two years ago, it was published by Mondadori, which later published other books by the author but some are still missing, see The Nature of Alexander which I have already read and I liked very much! Let’s talk about this extraordinary novel and now I understand why!
Fire from Heaven
(Alexander the Great #1)
by Mary Renault
Virago Press, 2014
Introduced by: Tom Holland
‘Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us’
HILARY MANTELAt twenty, when his reign began, Alexander the Great was already a seasoned soldier and a complex, passionate man. Fire from Heaven tells the story of the boy Alexander, and the years that shaped him.
‘The Alexander trilogy contains some of Renault’s finest writing. Lyrical, wise, compelling: the novels are a wonderful imaginative feat’
SARAH WATERS‘All my sense of the ancient world – its values, its style, the scent of its wars and passions – comes from Mary Renault’
EMMA DONOGHUE‘This is not just a novel. It’s also the best imagining we are ever likely to have of a man who tore up history… this is wonderful, scholarly, top-flight stuff’
Mary Renault (1905-1983) was best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece with their vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great.
GUARDIAN
Born in London in 1905 and educated at the University of Oxford, she trained as a nurse at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary, where she met her lifelong partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. Her first novel, Purposes of Love, was published in 1939. In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won an MGM prize worth £150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa.
It was in South Africa that Renault was able to write forth-rightly about homosexual relationships for the first time – in her last contemporary novel, The Charioteer, published in 1953, and then in her first historical novel, The Last of the Wine (1956), the story of two young Athenians who study under Socrates and fight against Sparta. Both these books had male protagonists, as did all her later works that included homosexual themes. Her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership.
Reading time: from December 31, 2024 to January 12, 2025.
I finally managed to read this long-awaited trilogy in Italian by an author everyone speaks highly of and I was curious to find out what I’d think of it too. I had started reading Fire from Heaven as soon as it came out in Italian edition, but I was finding it heavy and, realizing that it wasn’t the right time to read it, I put it aside. During the last Christmas holidays I picked it up again and started it again and I was literally enchanted by it. The first day of reading it I read more than a hundred pages, which shows how much it grabbed me and I liked it right away!
A masterpiece, now I understand why. And I’m only at the first book of the trilogy!
From the first pages, Renault’s deep knowledge and passion for the historical period and the customs and traditions of Greece at the time shines through, and she is a skilled storyteller. It was wonderful to read about little Alexander and I followed him as he grew up: we are used to seeing him as a young conqueror and charismatic warrior, but Mary begins by showing us the child running and playing in the halls and corridors of the royal palace of Pella, how he makes fun of the guards by eluding their surveillance. In Fire from Heaven we also meet Alexander together with Philip and Olympias: it was beautiful to see how the very young boy stands up to his mother and relates to his father, in a mix of reverence for the king and simply wanting to have something to do with his dad. Little Alexander grows up and trains under various teachers and little by little we also get to know his friends, including his stepbrother Ptolemy and one above all Hephaestion with whom he immediately has a special bond, as if they were half of the same soul and the scenes between the two are perfect and it is shown how their relationship is born and grows, not without arguments and misunderstandings that are soon smoothed out.
Renault inserted scenes of everyday life and created perfect episodes for Alexander, maybe they really happened or maybe they are just the fruit of the author’s imagination, but they are so realistic and well described that it doesn’t matter to know or discover it.
The secondary characters are also well described, they are well-rounded people: I liked the meeting between Ptolemy and Thais, the marital dynamics between Philip and Olympias. I really appreciated the description of the events during the marriage between Philip and Eurydice, because Renault talks about it focusing on emotions and not on the intoxication of people. The scenes of Alexander at the center of his mystery are also beautiful, of the emotions that are only his that he feels after the war, almost as if he longed for that intoxication, which Hephaestion is afraid of.
I liked everything about Fire from Heaven, I didn’t find a flaw in the book!
Fire from Heaven is a book that all fans of Alexander the Great should read: maybe not everyone will like it, but it should be a must-read. I leave you the sentences that I underlined and I can’t wait to read The Persian Boy!
‘His face has haunted me for years.’
Tom Holland, Introduction
Even the most powerful are destroyed in the end by their ambitions.
Tom Holland, Introduction
If one kept one’s mind upon what one wanted, the chance appeared.
It was said that when a King of Macedon was buried away from Aigai, the line would die.
The memories were deceitful, and each time they were invoked spoke with a different voice.
He cried easily at old war-songs where sworn comrades died together, at a falling cadence of the flute. He had cried half a day, when his dog fell sick and died. Already he knew what it was to mourn the fallen; for Agis he had wept his heart out. But to cry for his own wounds would make Herakles forsake him. This had long been a part of their secret compact.
If he had come like Phoinix to Achilles, he would have given him what he asked: have led out the Greeks to fight, taking the first of the death-fates, never to come home to the dear fatherland, never to grow old.
‘Never discourage your enemies from wasting time.’
‘You lead, you do not follow.’
‘Man’s immortality is not to live for ever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.’
‘One can’t know too much of Xenophon,’ Alexander said, ‘when it comes to horses.’
No lesson so good, thought Philip, as the one a man teaches to himself.
‘You can’t ask your men to put up with things you can’t bear yourself. ‘
‘Don’t fight me. One always doubts great good fortune.’
‘I shall start with this man in the way I mean to go on.’
‘What’s to become of us, boys,’ said Alexander laughing, ‘if he leaves us nothing to do?’
‘Herakleitos says, The best corrupted is the worst.’
‘A man dies faithful to his pride.’
‘One should learn to do without anything one can. But I should find it very hard to do without you.’
‘I’ll never love anyone I’m ashamed of, that I know.’
He was shining and calm at the centre of his mystery, the godlike freedom of killing fear. Fear lay dead at his feet.
‘No one can equal the gifts of the gods, one can only try to know them. But it’s good to be clear of debt to men.’
The boy knew his own limits, eager as he was to stretch them.
‘The price of a good lie is that it gets believed.’
In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.
‘What does it matter where a man comes from? It’s what he is in himself.’
‘He is like the great, the famous ones; like Lais or Rhodope or Theodotis they tell tales of in those old days. They don’t live for love, you know; but they live upon it. I can tell you, I have seen, they are the very blood of his body, all those men who he knows would run after him through fire. If ever the day comes when they will follow him no longer, it will be the same with him as with some great hetaira when the lovers leave her door and she puts away her mirror. He will begin to die.’
‘Even a fox,’ said Alexander presently, ‘runs through all its tricks in time. And the second time round, the nets are waiting.’
Men must not be spoken to on their way up from the shades, or they might sink back again for ever. This was well known.
‘Fame sweetens vengeance.’
His stubborn mistreatment of/his own condition seems self-destructive, whether consciously or not.
Alessandro III di Macedonia 
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