Funeral Games

Alexander the Great #3

by Mary Renault

As Funeral Games opens, Alexander the Great lies dying. Around his body gather the generals, the provincial satraps and the royal wives, already competing for the prizes of power and land. Only Bagoas, the Persian boy mourning in the shadows, wants nothing. Tracing the events of the fifteen years following Alexander's death, Funeral Games sees his mighty empire disintegrate, and brings Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy to a dramatic close.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, LGBT, Classics, Greece, Mythology

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Mary Renault was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander.

Her historical novels are all set in ancient Greece. They include a pair of novels about the mythological hero Theseus and a trilogy about the career of Alexander the Great. In a sense, The Charioteer (1953), the story of two young gay servicemen in the 1940s who try to model their relationship on the ideals expressed in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, is a warm-up for Renault's historical novels. By turning away from the 20th century and focusing on stories about male lovers in the warrior societies of ancient Greece, Renault no longer had to deal with homosexuality and anti-gay prejudice as social "problems". Instead she was free to focus on larger ethical and philosophical concerns, while examining the nature of love and leadership. The Charioteer could not be published in the U.S. until 1959, after the success of The Last of the Wine proved that American readers and critics would accept a serious gay love story.

Reviews

[Robert Dunbar · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I foresee great contests at my funeral games.”

Isn’t it funny how Mary Renault ultimately became a sort of historical personage in her own right? Well, not really funny, of course, but more sort of inevitable. After all, who's in her class? These days? Did you read that “historical” novel about Anne Boleyn that was on all the best-seller lists a couple of years ago? Apparently, poor Anne really did commit adultery with all those men (and boys) who were tortured into confessing. Plus, she practiced witchcraft. No, really.

Off with her head!

Class has left the building. Or at least the genre.

Even a generation ago, the coupling of well-researched psychological/sociological comprehension to the elegant rhythms and imagery of her prose placed Mary Renault well above the throng of historical novelists. Her saga of Alexander the Great, begun with Fire from Heaven and continued through The Persian Boy, climaxed with Funeral Games. Have ancient settings ever been more convincingly evoked?

Desert sands engulf the passions of men and women who remain persuasively human.

Yet this was an age of heroes. Alexander’s magnetism held together the known world, and his passing was felt as acutely as though it were the last of the gods who had died. (It’s sobering to contemplate how different our modern world might be if he had lived even a few more years.) The plot does not lack for incident. Amid mounting tensions, the barbarian mistress hatches a plot against the unborn child of the royal bride. Shackled men are trampled by elephants, examples to a mutinous army. Warriors, dying in the arms of enemies, discover common ground, while the king’s dancing boy refrains from suicide only so that he might care for his lover’s body, which must travel in state across an empire. All the ingredients of royal melodrama churn, from conspiracies and secret marriages to incest and matricide. The pot fairly boils over. And the broth is bloody… despite an author’s note informing the reader that “for reasons of continuity” several notable murders have been omitted.

As in some monstrous myth, the vengeance of the Furies spreads, not just through one accursed family, but to all. The hot Babylonian wind is scented with jasmine, and the torchlit night is full of cries.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It is for the scholars of each generation to purge it of its errors, before they infect the next."

"All those great men. When Alexander was alive, they pulled together like one chariot team. And when he died, they bolted like chariot horses when the driver falls. And broke their backs like horses, too."
This is the last of Renault’s Alexander trilogy and her last novel as well. It covers the years following Alexander’s death, charting what happened to the vast empire that he built up. It follows the fortunes of an array of characters who had served Alexander and wanted a piece or all of his power and territories. It is inevitably a tale of mischief, mayhem, duplicity, treachery and brutality. It does lack a stand out main character like Alexander or Bagoas. Again the writing is great. This isn’t really a stand-alone and it helps greatly to have read the previous two.
This is fiction, but it is hung on the historical bones. Does the trilogy chart how Alexander managed to do what he did and how those who followed him could not replicate it? That’s the key and I think Renault goes a fair way to doing it.
One of the main issues is that this does feel somewhat disjointed, partly because of the multiplicity of competing characters. It could have comfortably been twice the length and would have felt less rushed. There are stronger female characters in this novel and that is definitely a plus. This is not a cheery tale and the only character who does well out of it is Ptolemy, mainly because he narrows his ambitions and settles for ruling Egypt.

[CS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bullet Review:

I REALLY REALLY liked the first half and that would have been 5 stars. But then we started doing the time warp and I felt I was really an anthology of various people who knew Alexander instead of a cohesive novel. Still some good characters, but huge leaps in time skipping numerous events. But the end was worst; large jump in time, summarizing events.

Full Review:

Alexander the Great is dead (this is not a spoiler), and the various men and even women who knew him (or of him) desperately claw to get on top of the pile and to rule over the massive Empire Alexander carved.

At it's most basic, that's exactly what this story is, though there is far more going on that this one sentence cannot get into.

I'm sitting here, thinking, and I don't even know how I would begin to do what Renault did. What happened after Alexander died, the chaos, the power-seeking - there's a LOT of STUFF that happens, many people clawing to get to the top. So many people, all with different motivations and hopes for the kingdom, whether it be unification or just a small place to call his or her own.

I loved the first half. LOVED. Slowly, I'd been "getting" Renault and her craft as I've read through her Alexander the Great trilogy, and it was the first half of this book that everything clicked. I loved the characters, the way the story flowed - everything.

The problem happened as soon as we did the year jump. In previous books, time does pass, but it's nothing quite as jarring as seeing the big block letters "320 B.C." on the top of the page. I think, in order to show as much chaos and all the different peoples' intricate plans, Renault felt she had to do the Time Warp. And I don't know if it quite succeeded. When you jump a year, there are things that happen - such a Ptolemy moving to Egypt and taking over governorship there. This is something that is a given; the audience never sees it. And it feels weird that I should just accept it happened, when normally, this would be one more piece in the puzzle. (In fact, I think Ptolemy in general gets the shaft because we hardly see him at all in the book.)

We have quite the build-up to talking about Antipatros' reign - and then fast forward to the end and boom, yet time for another power struggle! What about the politics in that year of his reign? You cannot tell me that life was hunky-dory while he was ruling, that Eurydike and Roxane and Kassandros had just thrown their hands up and accepted his rule.

These are just a couple of the instances where I felt that I was only getting a small, small snippet of the most "exciting" portions of post-Alexander life. In many ways, it felt more like an anthology, a collection of short stories than a full-length cohesive novel.

And really, the disconnectedness is what makes me rate this lower. There's still a mighty good story - I loved Eurydike, even if she was incredibly stupid at times - but it feels like excerpts of a story instead of a full blown one.

Coming to the end of this book, I felt kinda sad. I've been Buddy Reading this trilogy with my friend for over a year now, and it's sad to leave the fascinating and exotic world of Alexander behind. I have really grown to appreciate Renault and her way with words and history. To people who think all history is boring, lemme just say: If you find it boring, you are reading the wrong author! Because history is absolutely FASCINATING in the hands of a competent author.


NOTE: Thank you to the amazing, Iset for a fabulous Buddy Read! This was an enjoyable run; let's do this again!

[nastya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final and the most brutal part of the trilogy. Alexander’s death without at least a teenage son from Macedonian woman left a power vacuum.
What happened next was a vicious fight for the throne. Hence the body count.
And only Ptolemy wants to leave this fight and go to Egypt. Wise decision in hindsight.
Interestingly, this violent novel had the best female characters of the trilogy. And all of them were mesmerizing to follow till the end.
Mary Renault now joins Dorothy Dunnett and Hilary Mantel in the pantheon of great historical fiction writers.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was honestly one of the most catastrophic books ever. I don't mean it was bad, just that everything in it was awful. It's the final chapter of a trilogy that no one ever writes, the part, after the hero has died, where everything goes to absolute shit and everything he worked for and stood for disintegrates.

(I loved the afterward where Renault points out that she actually left out a ton of the murders.) The only one I noticed was Kleopatra's though because her storyline just stopped after Perdikkas's death. The worst ones were Roxanne killing the pregnant Strataira and the deaths of Eurydike and Ariadios.

Eurydike was mostly awesome and so young, she was the perfect foil for Alexander who got near everything right and could see so far, while she was so sheltered even though her nature and nurture had set her such similar ambitions. Her storyline was certainly the most well-padded out and engaging. And her end was so shattering.

Renault handled all the chopping and changing of characters really well so that the storylines linked well. Bagoas at least was left some measure of peace and Ptolemy came out smelling of roses and had the last word which was nice.

So basically everything was terrible and I loved it.

[Iset · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t expect to be doing this, but I’m actually marking Funeral Games down from the first two books in Mary Renault’s trilogy; Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy. The difference? Renault jumps about a lot in time here. Of course her previous novels did this too – all of them were selective in their scenes, not comprehensive – but this time round Renault covers a much wider span of time, the events of thirty-seven years in total, a wider range than the first two books combined. And historically those thirty-seven years were chock full of conflicts, plots, and sudden reversals of fortune as Alexander’s generals duked it out for a slice of his empire. As a result, Renault ends up jumping from event to event, and some scenes, especially in the second half of the book, feel abbreviated, and the characters sketched rather than fully, immersively formed. That was my single major problem with Funeral Games. It was difficult to get into the story in the same way I had with The Persian Boy or Fire From Heaven, when Renault had to sketch the huge cast of characters that pop up over these thirty-seven years and resort to a tiny brushstroke here and there to try and convey much more about these characters.

The first half of the book felt much better written than the second half, largely because it spends a lot of time on the immediate aftermath of Alexander’s death, and Renault can lavish more pages on events and developing the characters involved. It distinctly feels like a more coherent narrative. This section of the novel retains Renault’s signature deft touch at characterisations and breaking down complex events into something lucid and understandable on a human level, without detracting from their complexity. In the second half, where many more years are spanned and characters far apart in location, there is a greater degree of summarisation going on.

A positive addition is that we get inside the heads of some of the people most closely connected to Alexander – family members, and the comrades who knew him the best. Through their eyes we finally see Alexander, how and why he was revered after his death, and how some who fought to carve up his empire for themselves failed spectacularly. A sense of ominous foreboding and unease permeates the whole book as the empire crumbles, and some of Alexander’s old friends try to preserve it and his memory, others make a grab for power, and others simply see the writing on the wall. The character of Ptolemy provides what I felt was Renault’s opinion on the failure of Alexander’s empire – the nature of Alexander was a mystery, he says, that could inspire great deeds and achieve the unachievable, and with his death they are all left merely fallible men.

8 out of 10

[Aldi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whereas The Persian Boy made me want to linger, this one made me want to get through it quickly because I knew everything would go to hell in a handbasket in a major way. Like Anna says in her review, it's that third book few authors would have the gumption to write. From the intimate, loving dignity of Bagoas' voice, it switches to a brisker tone; a chronicle, still beautifully written but also much more matter-of-fact, of how after the golden hero's death, his legacy falls rapidly and perhaps inevitably (there was only one Alexander) to pieces, his lovers dead or irreversibly diminished, his potential heirs' future precarious at best, his generals and former friends tearing down each other and his kingdom.

Ptolemy was the only breath of fresh air, wisely choosing to stay out of the succession wars and go found a dynasty in Egypt instead. I'd always liked him but I loved him madly for thinking of Bagoas and making sure he had a place that might eventually mend his soul a bit; it hurt so much to see Bagoas reduced to a broken shell, and his offhand mention of the only reason he didn't kill himself (because he didn't want to intrude on Alexander and Hephaistion's reunion) made me cry long after I thought I was done.

Apart from Bagoas, my sympathy here lay mostly with the women (Roxane, Eurydike and Olympias) who tried to make a place for themselves after Alexander's death, and were thwarted. Roxane and Olympias have mostly been characterised as ruthless murderous harpies but let's be honest, either of them could've done as good a job or better as any of the men who grasped for power; and Eurydike was mostly lacking age and experience.

The whole thing stays pretty brutal all the way through, so I was glad she chose to end on the chapter with Ptolemy; it was a little bit of a breath of relief.

[Nick Garbutt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last, and for me the best of the Alexander trilogy, Funeral Games takes up the story at the death of Alexander.
This is a vivid and extraordinary tale of the unravelling of friendships, alliances and marriage in the face of ambition.
It brilliantly conveys the frantic maneuverings on the death of a monarch and the scramble to succeed him and the hopeless inadequacy of those who followed Alexander to hold on to his legacy and conquests.
Much of what both he and his father achieved was lost and the promise held by a greater and earlier empire than that of Rome was squandered.
This is fine writing, a story well told whose lessons about power, ambition and greed are as valid today as they ever were.
I finished the last pages just as our plane touched down in Ireland, after our Greek holiday. It seemed fitting.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olympias 🤝 Roxane
the deadliest boy moms in history

Between 4.25 and 4.5 stars. It's dense and the pacing can be slow without a central narrator, but no one can do historical fiction like Mary Renault.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was surprising to me how good this book was.

I'm quite a fan of Alexander as a character, so I thought his absence would be noticed. In fact, his presence was vivid throughout the book, with every single character reminiscing, mourning, or fuming. Everyone had their WWAD moment, and only Ptolemy seemed to approach it correctly. (Speaking of whom, I never thought I'd grow to love someone who founded a ridiculous dynasty of sibling-fuckers this much <3)

I desperately want to see this trilogy done right in a show that resembles HBO's Rome. The only good thing that came from the movie-that-shall-not-be-named is that, in my head, Roxane is Rosario Dawson and Hephaistion is a young Jared Leto with eyeliner

[V.E. Ulett · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Alexander the Great trilogy was my first reading of Renault. She does so much with so few words. She's now my second favorite HF author - along side Patrick O'Brian.

[marianina · Rating 5 out of 5]

this trilogy is my Roman empire

[Elisabetta Buonavolontà · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Prevedo grandi competizioni ai miei giochi funerari”, parole che Alessandro avrebbe pronunciato sul letto di morte.
Col capitolo conclusivo della trilogia di Mary Renault, io mi sono sentita esattamente così: come se avessi letto tutto nella mia vita e non avessi più nulla per andare avanti. Una trilogia straordinaria che indaga molteplici punti di vista, partita con “Fuoco dal cielo”, che esplorava l’infanzia di Alessandro, le guerre di Filippo, l’amore di Efestione e gli intrighi della corte macedone. È proseguita con “Il ragazzo persiano”, capolavoro dell’autrice, in cui racconta mediante gli occhi di Bagoa gli ultimi sette anni di vita di Alessandro, facendoci respirare le sue battaglie dell’età matura, l’amore dell’eunuco e la vastissima cultura persiana. Infine, “Giochi Funerari” arriva inaspettatamente come un thriller dal sapore tragico, in cui regna un equilibrio precario, in una dimensione sospesa e sul punto di crollare.
La morte del più grande conquistatore di tutti i tempi ha destabilizzato chiunque. Mentre lui giace sul suo catafalco, i diadochi si spartiscono il potere. Burattino di tutta la situazione sarà Arrideo, il fratellastro idiota di Alessandro, colui che Olimpiade ha sempre temuto potesse usurpare il trono di suo figlio. I personaggi sono tanti, ma si muovono sullo sfondo delle vicende come agenti e reagenti all’interno di una tragedia, pronti a colpire e a difendersi tra intrighi e false alleanze. L’unico ad aver conservato la sua purezza è Bagoa, che ha dimostrato di non voler mai approfittare della morte del suo grande amore e di voler semplicemente vivere in pace, lontano dai misfatti. Sulla stessa scia si pone Tolomeo, generale e amico-fratello di Alessandro, il quale ha occasione di dimostrare quanto l’intelligenza, alle volte, sia persino superiore al valore militare. Tolomeo è carismatico ma poco ambizioso ed è questo che lo salva, in un mondo in cui l’ambizione sembra tutto.
Lo dimostra Perdicca, il più elevato in grado fra i generali di Alessandro, ma lo dimostrano anche Rossane, la moglie del defunto che porta in grembo suo figlio, il neoreggente nominato, Cratero, e il segretario del regno, Eumene. Lo dimostra Cassandro, rimasto nell’ombra per tanti anni, Antipatro, suo padre, reggente di Macedonia, Antigono, satrapo di Frigia, e il generale Seleuco. Sono nomi che chi ha studiato il periodo ellenistico ricorderà come vuote sagome, ma che qui, grazie alla penna eccelsa di Mary Renault, assumono forza e vitalità. Tuttavia, stavolta sono le donne che, a mio modesto parere, hanno le scene migliori: troviamo una vecchia Olimpiade, abbandonata dal primo volume e adesso più fragile e ambigua che mai; troviamo Cleopatra, non più ragazzina ma una donna che, dopo aver visto le strategie del potere, desidera solo vivere in pace.
E, infine, il personaggio meglio riuscito, quello di una fortissima quindicenne che si troverà ad affrontare responsabilità troppo più grandi di lei: Euridice, figura dimenticata della storia, nipote di Filippo II e moglie di Arrideo. Viviamo la sua forza, le sue incertezze, la sua mente non ancora contaminata dagli inganni del potere e la sua vitalità, immortale anche dinnanzi agli eventi tragici che le stravolgono la vita. I personaggi capiranno che non sono del tutto padroni di sé stessi, ma che, a dominarli, v’è solo uno: lo spettro scintillante dalla testa simile a una criniera di leone ritratto sulle dracme d’argento, che, morto sul suo catafalco dorato, governa il destino di tutti. Anche da morto, Alessandro è una figura presente, dominante, che, come le Moire – dal verbo “meiromai” (esser reso partecipe) – tesse il filo della vita degli uomini, spezzandolo a proprio piacimento.
Quando ho chiuso le pagine della trilogia avevo le lacrime agli occhi: ho percepito, dentro di me, tutto l’amore di Mary Renault nei confronti dei personaggi di cui ha parlato. Ho percepito in lei dodici anni di lavoro e una saggezza infinita da parte di una donna di settantasei anni conscia di star scrivendo l’ultimo capitolo di Alessandro Magno e della sua vita. Disse una volta a Daniel Mendelssohn: “Se i miei ammiratori vogliono scoprire chi sono, leggano le mie storie”, e inevitabilmente ho scoperto tanto di lei. Forse, è l’unica capace di ricreare il passato antico per ciò che è, senza infarcirlo di retoriche inutili e anacronistiche.
È una scienziata della storia, che fra le sue pagine rivive come se venissimo catapultati direttamente nel 323 a. C.. Nella sua trilogia, ci ha fatto rivivere in soli settant’anni un’era, quella di Alessandro, che epiloga aprendo le porte di una nuova epoca: l’età ellenistica, foriera di un movimento culturale che avrebbe investito qualsiasi ambito, dalla filosofia, alla letteratura, all’arte, alle forme di governo, a un nuovo concetto di corte e privatizzazione. La ringrazio con tutto il mio cuore per ciò che ha scritto e spero, ovunque ella si trovi, che in qualche modo possa gioire delle mie parole e del mio amore per lei e per la sua scrittura.

[carlageek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though The Persian Boy let me down a bit, I was nevertheless compelled to forge on, not yet ready to let Renault’s voice out of my ear or say goodbye to the machinations of the ancient world. I’m glad I did. Funeral Games does not quite achieve the relentless psychological intimacy of Fire From Heaven, but it does tease out a few satisfying, character-driven threads from a time of utter chaos.

Alexander dies in the book’s opening pages (only a man like Alexander can die twice, as he also died at the end of The Persian Boy) but his presence looms large in the years after his death, as large as the golden bier that Ptolemy takes from Babylon to Alexandria. Who has the strongest claim to the throne of Macedon and Asia, and which general can keep the loyalty of an army, depend entirely upon who can convince the soldiers that his or her blood ties are closest to Alexander, that his or her orders are what Alexander’s ghost desires. There is no moving forward for this kingdom; there is only desperate groping in a terrible darkness, where the Macedonian rank-and-file are sun-blind from the glare of Alexander’s charisma and utterly lost without it.

One has a palpable sense of the turning of the wheel of fortune, as one by one the players ascend only to fall, by hubris or miscalculation or plain bad luck. Perdiccas, Roxane, Antipater, Eurydike, Olympias, Cassandros, and others each take their turns on the wheel, driven by his or her own inner furnace, stoked by hunger for power, a sense of destiny, or a lifetime of envy. When Renault lays bare the inner needs that drive each of these characters, the book approaches the incisiveness of Fire From Heaven.

And, finally, women are given something to do; after Olympias’s pitiable intriguing in Fire From Heaven and the complete exclusion of women as actual people from The Persian Boy, Renault gives the young, headstrong Eurydike a substantial part on the stage. Things don’t end well for Eurydike; of all the putative leaders (save Ptolemy) her charisma comes closest to Alexander’s, but at barely 16, and a sheltered princess to boot, she lacks the experience and worldliness to avoid the crucial errors that undo her. But it is a pleasure to watch her best efforts, and hard not to root for her. Even Olympias and Roxane, murderous termagants both, get a few sympathetic and dignified moments.

Only Ptolemy remains mostly above the fray; content to take and hold Egypt, he schemes only to collect Alexander’s body, and then largely absents himself from the rest of the internecine squabbling. But there is powerful symbolism in that, as the law of Macedon gives the right to bury a dead king exclusively to his successor. And, when the book begins to skip through time in what amounts to a series of epilogues, the ancient and contemplative Ptolemy, the only man who was with Alexander from his birth to his death, gets the final word.

[Alicja · Rating 4 out of 5]

rating: 4/5

The world wasn’t ready for Alexander the Great’s death; he left behind an empty throne without a worthy successor. Yet many tried… and this is the setting of this third book in Renault’s trilogy. Alexander’s generals formed factions and alliances for various territories or seeking regency, new Macedonians with royal blood hoped to fill his shoes, armies and brothers/fathers divided over loyalties fighting against each other while Alexander’s still unborn children were used as pawns in the power struggle.

During the first two novels in the Alexander the Great series, Renault inspired awe as she led the readers through Alexander’s extraordinary life, watching the pieces fall together (through missteps, treachery, and pain as well as joy, loyalty, and love), as the dreams of an empire come together. In turn, this novel takes what he had built and smashes it to pieces through folly, hubris, greed, ignorance, feuds, and idiocy. It became increasingly painful to watch Alexander’s empire fall apart page after page. Not to fault Renault, she paints a beautifully heartbreaking picture, but it became almost emotionally unbearable to get through the last 100 pages.

Additionally, there are too many characters and I just couldn’t help but not be able to emotionally connect with many of them. Due to their appearances in the first two novels of the series, Bagoas and Ptolemy held my interest and continued emotional investment (although they only occupied a small fraction of the story). Aside from them, I was only able to connect with Eurydike, who was written brilliantly; which also surprised me since Renault seems to lack many interesting and realistically written female characters in her novels, usually the women characters aren’t painted in a positive light (although that also seems to reflect ancient Greek attitudes regarding women). And yet I felt for Eurydike as she, still in her teens, struggled to become a warrior Queen in a time that saw her as a silly girl.

Yet, the memory of Alexander haunts those left behind, as if taunting them in their failure. Renault ends the novel perfectly (won’t spoil it) tying it back to Alexander and leaving me in tears (again).

Overall, I couldn’t connect as well with this novel like I have with her other works, this may have been due to how many characters had to have been introduced or maybe because they were destroying Alexander’s empire which I have come to love. However, it is a brilliant political thriller that paints the struggle for Alexander’s power by individuals without even half the charisma, tactical genius, or vision. It’s like a train wreck that you just can’t take your eyes off.

[Kath B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the final book in the Alexander the Great trilogy and, in my opinion, the best of the three. It tells the story of the struggle for power and the division of Alexander's empire following his death and brings the brutality and intrigue of that time right onto the page. This is an author who really knows her subject and the depth of research is apparent throughout the book even though it is a fictional account. However, this is also a very good story, keeping the reader captivated until the very end.

There are a lot of characters in this book but a handy list of the main ones is included at the beginning so that you can recall who's who and, because they are so well written, you get to know them very quickly anyway.

The book explains different factions' claims to the Macedon dynasty and how each tried to achieve these; how some of Alexander's generals stayed loyal to his family whilst others followed their own causes, or those of the strongest man left standing, taking over and strengthening parts of the empire.

More than anything else, the book managed to convey the enormity of Alexander's feat in building his empire and in maintaining the love and loyalty of his soldiers and his family even though he is no longer a live character. A fascinating read for anyone interested in this period of history.

[Vaidya · Rating 4 out of 5]

While The Persian Boy stopped at the point where Alexander was dying, this book takes off from there. It's a rollicking ride covering the 47 years after Alexander's death, the infighting, intrigues, conspiracies to get the Macedonian throne.

After the first quarter of the book, characters keep dropping dead like flies, killed by rivals through various means or in battlefields. All that is left at the end is just Ptolemy who wisely chooses the Satrapy of Egypt, fortifies it well, and stays away from Macedonian squabbles. At the very end only he is left to tell the tale of Alexander. The rest die, killed conspiratorially by rivals.

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling account of the battle for power following the death of Alexander the Great. This is the first Mary Renault I have read and it took me a while to follow the pace of her often stilted writing. Sometimes it read like a translation. Very few of the characters were more than one dimensional but I suppose this is because the story covers such a long period and so there was little time to develop them. Mostly, they didn't live long enough anyway! Despite all this, it's a good read and was quite unputdownable towards the end.

[Michael Flick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The struggles, chaos, and disintegration of Alexander’s conquests after his death, leaving behind no heir and no plans, 323 BC — 286 BC. A sad and gory story. Seems only Ptolemy fared reasonably well.

[Edmund Marlowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Epilogue

This last of Renault's trilogy about Alexander the Great opens with his dying in Babylon. At first, it follows the ensuing and highly dramatic struggle for power in detail, then it takes gradually greater jumps in time until the end, when an elderly Ptolemy finishes his history of Alexander thirty-seven years later. It is a dramatic story, dark and violent compared to her other novels, in keeping with the real historical intrigues it relates.

Though not the sort of sequel that has to be read after its predecessors, as the plot does not depend on prior knowledge, it will be much better appreciated by those who have at least read The Persian Boy. Taking Renault's Greek historical novels together, I think one can say her view of Greek history is of it leading up to Alexander as its apogee, and then away from him, as here. As a result, Funeral Games reads like an extended eulogy, his death at the beginning its critical moment, and its focus becoming ever dimmer as it moves forward in time. Perhaps it is only thus that it could work as the last of a trilogy about a man who died in its first chapter. Like its predecessors, it is fiercely pro-Alexander, its most constant theme being what a tragedy his death was for almost every character, individually and collectively. The selfish motives of those who did not lament him merely serve to underline his excellence.

Renault's historical novels ¬¬have often been attacked for depicting women either as passive or not at all, though to have done otherwise would be hard in a faithful portrait of a society with such masculine values. Funeral Games should have been the novel to appease these critics, and I don't understand why it seems not to have succeeded. The cast of females here is much larger, their roles more important, their characters richly varied, and four are unusually strong characters. The Persian royal mother, Sisygambis is a personification of the proud, dignified and thoroughly decent old lady. Alexander's mother Olympias is fierce and cruel but has enough of her son in her to inspire awe and reverence. His wife Roxane is depicted as similar but vile and without redeeming qualities, as if Renault wished to dismiss her as a worthy part of Alexander's life (a point to which I shall return). Most interesting of all is the almost self-made teenage Queen, Eurydike, perhaps because Renault put so much of herself into her. Poignantly doomed to ignominious failure in a man's world, despite her strong spirit, she, and perhaps Renault, appear to think she could have been an Alexander if only she had been born a boy.

Having made a special study of all the ancient sources covering the period in question, it may interest those who share my very high opinion of Renault that Funeral Games is not actually as perfect in historical authenticity as one might expect from her. For example, Eumenes was not nearly as old as depicted (Cornelius Nepos XVIII 13 says he became secretary in 343 when he was 19 and Alexander 12 or 13) . The plot is sometimes flawed, as when Alexander's top generals are made to know Stateira was pregnant and think her son more worthy to be the next King, and yet, inexplicably, none of them say anything about it at the gathering assembled to decide the succession.

These are small imperfections. A much more serious criticism of her depiction of Alexander in all of her novels about him is that she has over-homosexualised him, not through overly emphasising his love affairs with Hephaistion and Bagoas, but through unfairly deprecating his two love affairs with women. The ancient sources depict Alexander as genuinely involved with both women and boys with a typically Greek sense of there being no contradiction involved, but the one affair of his life they clearly depict as both passionate and founded on eros is that with Roxane. On any fair assessment, it was surely one of the greatest love affairs of antiquity, the greatest man in the world choosing to marry (rather than take) a young girl of remarkable beauty but otherwise little importance.

In contrast, in The Persian Boy, Renault depicts their entanglement as a brief infatuation. Her Alexander soon tires of Roxane and thereafter merely tolerates her out of loyalty and kindness. The known reality was very different. Their surviving son was conceived sometime in the two months following Hephaistion's death and only eight months before the King's, which suggests it was to Roxane that he turned for solace in his greatest grief, rather than Bagoas or the new royally-born wife on whom he should have been trying to beget an heir.

Roxane's first appearance in Funeral Games is when she is removed from the dying Alexander's chamber at Bagoas's suggestion because her demonstrative and self-pitying grief was disturbing her husband. Actually, Bagoas is not even known to have been still living then, and Roxane is attributed a movingly loving role in her husband's last days by the only, albeit unreliable, sources to speak of it.

Even worse is Renault's total omission of Alexander's mistress Barsine, who came into his life well before Bagoas and was still sufficiently part of it at least three years later to bear him a bastard son, Herakles. Lest this be supposed to be an understandable simplification of Alexander's story rather than a desperate attempt to deny Alexander such heterosexual enthusiasm, I should point out that in her biography The Nature of Alexander, Renault goes so far as to pour scorn on Herakles's existence despite the unanimous certainty of our sources.

Shorter, grimmer and less moving than Renault's other historical novels, mostly because none of the major characters are deeply appealing, Funeral Games is still excellent by general standards.

Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander’s Choice, the tragedy of an Eton schoolboy strongly influenced by Renault's writing, https://www.amazon.com/dp/191457107X

[Ana Flores · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Tantos grandes hombres... Cuando Alejandro vivía, tiraban juntos como los caballos de un carro. Y cuando murió, se desbocaron como los caballos cuando cae el auriga. Y también como los caballos se partieron la espalda.»


Hay muchos libros, más de los que he podido leer, sobre Alejandro. De la Grecia antigua en general los hay también, aunque casi todos ellos terminan con la muerte del Conquistador del Mundo. Es entendible. El resto de la historia de la pobre Grecia en decadencia ya no inspira mayores glorias y queda en cambio opacada por la cada vez más brillante historia de la naciente Roma.

No obstante, si bien la historia de Grecia en sí misma luego de Alejandro no es ya mucho más que una interminable y absurda «guerra de ratones» (palabras de Alejandro), los ecos y retumbos de sus hazañas no terminaron con su muerte, en absoluto. Apenas él fallecido se desató la guerra, esta vez a escala «mundial», entre sus belicosos sucesores, los diádocos, en la que Grecia sería apenas otro pequeño escenario de los acontecimientos.

Hasta no hace mucho tuve que conformarme con la información escueta, panorámica y algo descuidada que los libros sobre historia de Grecia dan al respecto, además de los resúmenes y cortos informes de las enciclopedias de historia. Aparte de Demetrio y Eumenes, Plutarco no trata en sus Vidas paralelas a ningún otro de los protagonistas principales de estas guerras, y el relato de Polibio inicia ya terminadas éstas.

Entonces encontré el libro El mundo griego después de Alejandro, de Graham Shipley, que trata precisamente sobre este periodo y lo que se sigue hasta la conquista de Roma de todo el ámbito Mediterráneo, y que si bien me dejó mucho más enterada no quedé del todo satisfecha. La culpa de ello deben tenerla los aislados artículos sobre Alejandro y todo lo con él relacionado que de cuando en cuando aparecen en las revistas de historia y que tan encantadores detalles narran, y que Shipley apenas toca o de plano no menciona. El Periodo Helenístico objeto de su estudio es demasiado amplio como para detenerse demasiado en hechos o personajes específicos, y las guerras de los diádocos ocupan sólo la primera parte de su libro. Lo restante de éste, si bien tiene sus encantos, ya lo tenía casi completamente digerido con las Historias de Polibio, las Vidas de Plutarco y la historia de Roma.

Pero, y he aquí mi punto, el señor Shipley hace una referencia, prácticamente una recomendación al lector, al libro de Mary Renault, Funeral Games, que reconstruye en forma novelada una versión muy realista de los hechos. De la Renault ya había yo leído, y muy complacida, su biografía sobre Alejandro, y aunque sabía también de sus novelas históricas, a mí las tales novelas siempre me han despertado bastantes recelos y suelo tomarlas con pinzas, por lo que no había hecho mayor caso de éstas.

Para mi grata sorpresa, Juegos funerarios me encantó desde el principio. Las dotes de narradora de la autora no son menores que su habilidad como biógrafa. Sabe cómo despertar el interés, medir los tiempos, los efectos, reconstruye muy bien el carácter de sus personajes y sabe muy bien lo que se dice. No exagera, no jalonea ni abusa de la credibilidad de su lector, y así como la Yourcenar, se dedica tan sólo a narrar y humanizar los hechos históricos, parchando las lagunas con mesura, sin aventurar hipótesis absurdas de su propio coleto, como tanto se hace en el género.

Además, me parece que tiene la prudencia, o simple talento literario, de no meterse con las complicaciones y avatares de los grandes enfrentamientos bélicos (tema que en detalle trata Diodoro en su libro XVIII, y que pude leer sólo un poco después), dedicándose por entero a reconstruir los pensamientos, sentimientos o pasiones de todos aquellos seres que el gran Alejandro dejó atrás, abandonados a su suerte.

Un único, significativo detalle (defecto suena muy feo y quizá no es para tanto) encuentro en su obra, el mismo que también tiene su biografía, que es su evidente, tal vez excesiva adoración por la figura de Alejandro. Lo idolatra, no puede evitarlo. Da por hecho sólo lo bueno de él, duda siempre de los malos rumores, minimiza o desdeña detalles escabrosos; su reconstrucción, del todo ficticia, de Alejandro IV da clara muestra de ello. Es un ideal, un sueño romántico, que si bien pudo ser real, muy probablemente no lo fue.

O quién sabe, podría ser (¿por qué no?) que esa idealización, esa literal conversión de Alejandro en un ser divino, que se distingue por completo de los meros mortales que los rodearon (ellos sí, bastante humanos), haya sido a conciencia; después de todo, la novela no trata sobre el gran rey, sino sobre el recuerdo, la sombra y finalmente la leyenda que su figura dejó entre aquellos que muy de cerca o de lejos lo conocieron, y que a su vez transmitieron a todos lo que venimos después. Que como escribió Gabo: «la vida no es la que uno vivió, sino la que uno recuerda...»

Me gustó, me emocionó y mantuvo mi interés a pesar de que bien sabía ya lo que iba a ocurrir a continuación y al final. Es en momentos como este que se comprenden a cabalidad las palabras de la Morrison, acerca de que lo interesante en la literatura no es tanto saber qué fue lo que pasó ni tan siquiera por qué, sino cómo.

Muy buen libro. Aparta un tanto mi natural suspicacia por la novela histórica.

[Rhosyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

My, what an ending!

Honestly, this might be the craziest final part of a trilogy that I've ever read!

Why I liked this book (spoilers):
The plot and action was fantastic! The non-stop action and plotting kept me thoroughly entertained. Due mainly to Alexander not clearly naming an heir or planning who would succeed him if he ever died, this book clearly portrays the collapse of what he'd managed to establish. That is, with no clear successor, almost everyone is vying for the throne. Almost everyone is scheming, plotting and backstabbing one another. And almost every character you've come to know dies as a result of this (sob). It was so painful to go from the second and first book, where everyone liked, respected and worked well with one another to this book where the characters were made to be almost unlikeable as they either failed to properly understand Alexander's wishes or completely disregarded them.

Nevertheless, while you do come to dislike/despise some of the characters, most of their deaths are either so horrifying you pity/respect them or they manage to redeem themselves a little through their actions/words before dying. What's even crazier is the fact that, historcially, even more people died/were betrayed (its like the whole of A Song of Ice and Fire in a single book).

Gosh, this book was something else!

Memorable lines (that summed up the book for me):
(Eurydike to her army) "Can you find me a trumpeter? We must call them back!"
He ran his hand over the horse's sweating neck. Slowly, like a man explaining something simple to a child, which even a child must see, he said, "But, madam. That is Alexander's mother."
"Traitor!" She knew it was unjust, her anger belonged elsewhere. She has seen, at last, her real enemy. Not the terrible old woman on the black horse; she could be terrible only because of him, the glowing ghost, the lion-maned head on the silver drachmas, directing her fate from his golden bier.
"There's no help for it," said the man, forbearingly, but with little time to spare for her. "You don't understand. You see, you never knew him".

Eurydike was possibly one of the characters I loved learning the most of in this book. Her ambition and drive is similar to Alexander's and was great to read about. However, being a young woman in this time period, she hasn't had the opportunity to properly work/strive to achieve her ambitions in the same way he did. Therefore, when she tries to lead her army in a seemingly heroic and grand way, (like Alexander had done) she falls short as she cannot connect to the soldiers in the same way that he had done. Consequently, the soldiers ignore her and go to Olympia while she is left to suffer ...

Overall, the only thing I disliked in this book (besides spending so little time with Bagoas) was being slightly confused with who all the characters were since there were so many of them (some with more than one name) and all with unusual names. To be fair though, I started reading the series with the first book and didn't have the copy of the text that had all of the character's names listed down (with notes on who they were) and a map which tracked the movements of Alexander. Honestly - make sure you have these in the text you're reading as they're definitely a big help!

4/5

[Carla Bull · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so pumped right now, I feel like I could scale a building. This series was absolutely stunning, it has given me LIFE. I finished this book at about 2am and I have been buzzing ever since.

When I started out with Fire from Heaven, my knowledge of Alexander was pretty non-existent. Horse, hair, conquest. Three books down the line, (and a little reading around the subject because I have no chilllllll) and I've realised several things:

I've realised that Mary Renault's version of Alexander is a very positive one. It is, and I challenge you, almost impossible not to love him. But in truth, Alexander did some pretty awful things. Alexander was not a good guy. But he also did a lot of crazy, interesting, incredible things too.

I've realised that Mary Renault oh my GOD, she followed what scant knowledge there exists of Alexander's campaign very closely. She is not messing around here in terms of key events and key people. Everything was as close to accurate as we are going to get, and treated with so much care. History and fiction combined in the most powerful and mesmerizing way. Unf.

I've realised that the way she structured these three books is utterly dazzling. Switching perspective, changing mood, pulling back the curtain on key events. I love books like this, I am actually crying a bit right now. This stuff gets me okay.

Funeral Games is set during the aftermath of Alexander's death, literally just at the point he is still breathing his last. (nooo whyyyy) What I found especially emotional about this, (having read them in quick succession), was leaping from Bagoas' (my sweet, precious Bagoas) mind, back to observing these events unfold around Alexander. It made me feel like a ghost, like I'd been granted this special permission to follow Bagoas for a time, and now I had to say goodbye.

In Funeral Games we switch back to multiple POV's, watching in horror the huge effect Alexander's death had on the people around him. This great, empty void of uncertainty that began sucking his friends and family into it one by one.

What I especially loved about Funeral Games is that it is largely about Alexander's women. His mother, his wives, the incredible Eurydice II of Macedon!! I thought for sure she was an invention. She was such a badass, I was rooting for her all the way. The events in this book are so wild, I had to keep fact checking to see if there were sources attesting to them. And yes, apparently, shit just got this real. It was so great! I had this book glued to my hands for two days!

Oh, I want to ramble on but that is absurd so I am going to finish here. And I am going to say, these books are BRILLIANT. I loved them. I am absolutely going to read them again, and I am going to be thinking about them for weeks to come.

[Seth Reeves · Rating 3 out of 5]

The final book in Mary Renault's novelization of the life and death of Alexander the Great did give me what I longed for in the second book, the point of view of more of the characters. It also kept going with her somewhat stilted, overwrought writing style.

The story is all about the few years following Alexander's death. You immediately are given to understand that the only person around who could at once expand and maintain so vast and diverse an empire was gone and there was not a single person left in his wake that could take his place. This makes sense considering that Alexander wanted all of his soldiers and officers to marry up with the conquered peoples and create a new race of Macedonian/Greek/Persian/Indian/a ton of other ethnicities while most people at this time in history would have considered anyone from even slightly outside the tiny area they grew up in as either barbarians or simply unsuitable-to-mix-with foreigners.

Everyone around the empire that felt that Alexander unfairly ignored them while he was alive or sees their chance to stand out starts to think about how they are going to fill the power vacuum. They succeed and fail to varying degrees but the people who really get reamed are anyone who was directly related to Alexander as they are enemy #1 for anyone that wants to rule the empire. A character you are sympathetic to in one part of the story can turn around and become a horrible tyrant only to eventually get strung up and fed to carrion by his or her own men.

I can say I'm glad I read these books. They've been hanging out on my Kindle almost since I first got it and I had put off reading them because the reviews weren't very kind. I can't knock the author for taking all this history and getting it into around 1300 pages of novel without every chapter being a revelation in style and prose. I must say I enjoyed historical fiction by Gore Vidal or Robert Graves much more but the story was intriguing in places and she managed to strain a lot of the melodramatics out of this last book that were somewhat annoyingly displayed by Hephaiston in the first book and the eunuch and narrator Bagoas in the second book. I think this trilogy is definitely worth reading, if only to make you more knowledgable about one if history's greatest historical figures, but I would advise taking them on when you are on a real reading binge or are about to study Alexander the Great in college. Otherwise, although the story and the man's life are unbelievably interesting, you might get a bit bored and give up on them midway through the second book. The third one wraps it up very well so just don't stop till the end, like Alexander.

[Saimi Korhonen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funeral Games was a wonderful finale for a wonderful trilogy!

I really enjoyed the earlier books and luckily Funeral Games didn't disappoint me. Just like the two previous books in this trilogy, Funeral Games was an atmospheric and intense read full of political schemings, war and well-written characters. This book follows the events that took place after Alexander the Great's rather surprising early death. We get to follow multiple characters - some who were already introduced in the earlier books, such as Ptolemy and Roxane, but also some amazing new characters like Eurydike, a distant relative of Alexander, whom I LOVED - as they fight over Alexander's empire.

I liked how we got to see reactions to Alexander's death from many characters, some who hated him and some who loved him, and how, throughout the book, though he was long gone, you could still feel his presence in the world he left behind. The memory of what Alexander accomplished haunted those who came after him and weighed on their shoulders, and whenever a new person stepped up to take control of the empire, they were always compared to Alexander. All this was super interesting to read about.

Another thing about Funeral Games that I liked a lot was getting more significant female characters. In the first book there was really only Olympias, and in the second book Roxane, but in Funeral Games we were introduced to Eurydike (and her mom Kynna) and Alexander's sister Kleopatra played a big part in the story as well, as did Roxane and Olympias.

[Ben Kane · Rating 5 out of 5]

How right the people who advised me to read Mary Renault were. I started with Fire from Heaven, and was blown away by the precise, yet almost musical prose. Laden with historical detail, the book evoked 4th century BC Greece as I could never have imagined. Thanks to the titling on my kindle, I mistakenly read this volume next. No matter - I knew much of the history already, and have now moved on to The Persian Boy.

Back to this book. This is historical fiction at its finest. It simply doesn't get better than this - at least not in this reasonably well-read person's opinion. I won't go into the ins and outs of the plot: other reviewers have done that well. Be sure to read the first two books before this one, however.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Renault makes the ancient world feel real, and this novel is no exception. It is also the most brutal and bloodthirsty novel I've read by her. Not surprising when the prize in these funeral games is a throne. Political machinations, the consequences of overstepping one's authority or ability, and the dangers of political chaos are all potently portrayed. Tonally this could almost be read as a standalone from Renault's first two novels about Alexander, but it helps a lot to know the background history. This novel would be twice as long if it had to explain all of the background history that undergirds this novel, freed from the restraining hand of Alexander.

[Claudia Camacho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful! I enjoyed this book from begining to end. Again, this is an accurate and beautifully constructed historical account of the succession wars that followed Alexander the Great's unexpected death, but most importantly, it is an honest depiction of human nature: Renault has the sensitivity to capture the essence of all her characters to show them at their best and at their worst without making a caricature out of any of them.

This novel is so rich in every single aspect that I want to read it again already. I wish more books were like this...

[Athena Love · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is actually a comedy if you just imagine Alexander sitting in his corner of Isles of the Blessed with his head in hands, mumbling “I said Krateros” over and over as he watches this shitshow unfold all while Hephaestion rubs his back.

Also: the maternal instincts I had over Arrhidaeus were insane. The guy just wanted to see the elephants, collect some rocks, and not be king and he couldn’t even do that. Tragic.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish the author had added more information at the end about what was historically stated, and what she had to fill in, but this was a fascinating look at how Alexander's empire disintegrated after his death. Deeply depressing, though. The historical equivalent of Hamlet - easier to list the survivors.