Historical fiction set in Ancient Greece about ordinary people

April 9, 2023 6:15 PM

I would love to find more historical fiction set in Ancient Greece, about ordinary people. I'm a huge fan of Gillian Bradshaw, so anything like that would be a plus. I'm not picky about the genre either.

I'm working on a Super Secret Project with an ancient Greek theme, and so I've been rereading my favorite books set in ancient Greece. I just reread all the books by the amazing and talented Gillian Bradshaw which feature Hellenistic settings and characters (THE SUN'S BRIDE is great), and I'm in the middle of reading JM Alvey's (aka Juliet McKenna) mysteries set in Periclean Athens (the Philocles series). Both authors are SO SO good at capturing the mindsets and physical lived realities of classical Greek and Hellenistic times, with lots of romance and prominent-- yet realistic-- women characters, and it's something I love soooo much.

Anyway, I want to find more books like that! ARE there more books like that? I don't know.

Caveats: NOTHING MYTHOLOGICAL **OR** SET IN ANCIENT ROME. Also I want to read about ordinary people! Also not really interested in Alexander the Great, thanks.

Anyway, Gary Corby is good, and I really enjoyed Mary Renault's THE MASK OF APOLLO when I was a kid. There's also Tom Holt's GOATSONG, which I also liked as a teenager (I hated his book about Nero from a few years ago, so I'm not sure how his other books would hold up against the suck fairy).

Twitter has had one or two good recs for me, but I want to know what the fine folks of Metafilter think! When I did a thread about Ancient Egypt a few years ago, y'all had some great recs.

Thanks!!

posted by suburbanbeatnik to Writing & Language (7 answers total)

Mary Renault did love to write about Alexander & Theseus. But if you're trying to avoid those characters, and you enjoyed The Mask of Apollo, you might also consider checking out The Last of the Wine (about a student of Socrates) and The Praise Singer (about a poet) as well.
posted by Johnny Assay at 7:19 PM on April 9, 2023

'The Golden Mean' by Annabel Lyon is about famous people (Aristotle) in Hellenistic era Greece, but the sequel 'The Sweet Girl' is about somewhat less-famous people (Aristotle's daughter Pythias) and goes into a view of the class system from her unique perspective.
posted by ovvl at 7:56 PM on April 9, 2023

Hmm, both my suggestions may be a bit off-target, but see what you think. AJ Demas writes "fantasy ancient world romance", for want of a better phrase. Actually, to use her own phrase from her Twitter biog, "love and imaginary politics in an ancient Mediterranean with the serial numbers filed off". This includes books set in a Greek-inspired world. This Tor review talks about two of them. Another review here, and Dear Author.

My other thought is Margaret Doody's series about Aristotle as detective. I've only read the first, years ago (there was a long gap between the first and the sequels), and my memory is it wouldn't be ordinary-people enough, but you could give it a try. Goodreads gives a decent sense of it, or there is a review here.
posted by paduasoy at 8:11 PM on April 9, 2023

You might enjoy "24 hours in ancient Greece." It's set in Athens during a pause in the Peloponnesian wars. It's not a novel exactly. Each chapter is a vignette about an hour in the life of an ordinary person at the time. It's factual, with an extremely thin gloss of plot (that doesn't carry over from chapter to chapter), but it's not at all dry. It does include several women, although they're not the majority.

(I know you said you weren't interested in Rome, but for anyone else reading this I'll mention that I thought "24 Hours in Ancient Rome" was stronger/better. The ancient Greece one is still good though.)
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 10:42 PM on April 9, 2023

I really loved "The Afghan Campaign." It is set during Alexander's march east, but it is definitely not about Alexander—I think he appears maybe just once in the novel, at a distance.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 10:40 AM on April 10, 2023

Came back to add, if you read older children's books, there's The Spartan Twins (1918) by Lucy Fitch Perkins. Doesn't have the tone or complexity of the books you mention, though.

Also, Historical Novels.info has a decent list, some of which look as if they fit your criteria.
posted by paduasoy at 1:10 AM on April 11, 2023

I'm just here to second the first comment. Here's how The Last of the Wine starts:

When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me.

You will say there is nothing out of the way in this. Yet I daresay it is less common than you might suppose; for as a rule, when a father decides to expose an infant, it is done and there the matter ends. And it is seldom a man can say, either of the Spartans or the plague, that he owes them life instead of death.

It was at the beginning of the Great War...

posted by kingless at 9:02 AM on April 11, 2023