[The] less inhibited cousin [of the historical novel], the legendary romance—a freer form because it is by nature exempt from the restrictions of historical fact—is no less honorable and may offer even more in the way of inventive and persuasive entertainment.

Mary Renault's evocations of the Greek past, starting with "The Last of the Wine" (1956), are admirable examples of this genre, perhaps the best we have…. [In "The King Must Die"] an act of scholarship and art combined to give us a novel that was at once ancient and contemporary, as beautifully and horribly moving as the wild legends upon which it was based.

In her new book, "The Bull From the Sea," we have the sequel, which carries the story on to the death of Theseus. Sequels are a tricky business, as are afterthoughts in general; but this one is no falling off, no perfunctory attempt to extend the excitement of a past success. In certain respects it is even finer work—more lucidly constructed and more firmly self-contained than its predecessor. The archaeologizing is less overt, for one thing, less in love with itself; the psychological insights, particularly with respect to Theseus and his innocent, chaste son, Hippolytos, somehow run much deeper into the tragic nature of these self-doomed agonists. The result, once again, is excellent entertainment, but the implications of the saga are perhaps more expertly set forth….

We have heard a great deal about the bulls of Crete, most brilliantly from Miss Renault herself…. It was the controlling symbol of "The King Must Die," and it is the motive, the noble code, that runs through "The Bull From the Sea."…

These animals are sensational enough in all conscience, but as Miss Renault handles them they are neither fancy nor specious. They represent a mystique; they are the objects of a religious cult; but she has had the art to make it seem a true cult, not a literary fad or an exercise in archaeological reconstruction. Moreover, in this novel they keep their place, which was not always true of them in "The King Must Die"; now the range of interest is wider, if only because King Theseus has so many more things that he must do.

I have said that the legendary romance is relatively free of factual restrictions, and so it is. Nevertheless, certain inevitabilities do confront the writer: in the case of Theseus, son of Aigeus, there are things that he must do, exploits that everyone—even Plutarch—admits to the canon of legendary fact. (p. 1)

Here is material for confusion, and Miss Renault does not wholly escape it. As a saga hero with a compulsion to travel and a habit of turning up at every important world event in the company of whatever national celebrity is involved, Theseus has no rival except perhaps Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd. Inevitably, therefore, "The Bull From the Sea" must deal with heroic episodes that are widely spaced and held together only by the presence and personality of the hero. The composition tends toward a more or less discrete series of set pieces—here come the Lapiths, now for the Amazons, and so on—and it says worlds for Miss Renault's skill as a craftsman that she is able to make her transitions from one to another of them with so little awkwardness, so great a measure of apparent ease. Even so, the episodes do have something of the air of the historical pageant about them, and it may be that this is one of the insoluble difficulties in re-creating a familiar saga.

Like Robert Graves in his comparable romances, Miss Renault tends to reduce the supernatural element in mythology, to rationalize it when it is at all possible to do so. This, I take it, is a form of the technique that is called euhemerism—the reduction of the miraculous to reasonable terms…. Hippolytos does not directly offend Aphrodite, as he does in Euripides, and so incur a curse for hubris; and while his death may be brought about by Poseidon in response to Theseus' imprecation, it may equally well be accounted for by an earthquake, a sacred bull, and a chariot accident.

Yet Poseidon is god of earthquakes and bulls and horses, and the determination is ambiguous, after all. Miss Renault is extremely ingenious in matters of this kind (conviction is irrelevant, it seems to me), and her ingenuity is appropriately and entertainingly Euripidean. With more data than the tragic poet could possibly have had, and with considerably more imagination and psychological insight, she creates a Theseus who is tragic—in the technical sense of the word—winningly and generously noble, winningly and maddeningly frail. (pp. 1, 26)

It would be false to say that she has "modernized" Theseus and Phaedra, Hippolyta and Hippolytos. That is the way of cheap romance. What she has done, and done with consummate beauty, is to breathe life and light into the faces of heroic personages who have had neither since Euripides left them. Everything about them is credible, and nearly everything is explained; what is left unexplained, as must always happen, are the deepest springs of human motive and action that tease the poetic imagination without ever yielding up wholly their mystery. As a devotee of this mystery the author of "The King Must Die" and "The Bull From the Sea" deserves our admiration and our gratitude. (p. 26)