Any historical novelist worth his salt makes the material of his tale faithful to the realities of the age he wishes to revive, banishing stereotypes and bringing alive figures dimmed by the passage of years. Mary Renault did this in her 1956 novel, "The Last of the Wine."… In "The King Must Die,"… she does it again so well, in fact, that it puts her in the top echelon of historical novelists.

For her material this time Miss Renault has turned to the old Greek legend about Theseus, the hero-king of Athens….

Miss Renault does not tell the legend in its entirety, but culls from it and improvises. Nor does she rely alone on the eternal appeal of folklore material for the fascination of her tale. She ventures into the complex pre-Hellenic era confidently and, with imagination and insight, takes the myth out of mythology by creating a persuasively realistic and touchable canvas crowded with ancient people and places. What has previously been consigned to ancient vase paintings and frescoes—the cupbearers of age-old Crete, its snake goddesses, blue-robed and jeweled court ladies, bull trainers, acrobats—takes on new meaning in her retelling.

In portraying Theseus himself, Miss Renault invests him with gusto for athletics, politics, women, battle and bull-baiting. None of the dark complexes with which modern analysts like Carl Jung and Erich Neumann have saddled Theseus plagues Miss Renault's hero. Instead, he enjoys life to the fullest and lets his spirit of independence carry him to triumph and tragedy….

Every scene, every episode in Miss Renault's book is suffused with the color and drama of its locale. In Crete she makes us eyewitnesses to the parade of people on their way to the arena where the sacrifice to the Minotaur will be made…. In this excursion into the cryptic past—the twilight zone where ancient literature, legend and history fuse—Mary Renault carries no axe to be ground; she does not try to force parallels between our own times and the past. Her aim is merely to present the panorama of the ancient world in all its teeming humanity, its vibrant color and its fabulous wonder. All these things she does superbly well.