The Last of the Wine
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40 free The Last of the Wine trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine, published in 1956, was her first novel set in ancient Greece and the book that made her name as a historical novelist. Its narrator, Alexias, grows up in Athens as the city's long war turns against it, studies with Socrates, and falls in love with an older athlete named Lysis. This quiz covers the story from the narrator's troubled birth to the fall of the city and the fight to free it: the family, the famous Athenians who cross the page, the athletic contests, the battles, and the custom that gives the novel its title. A handful of questions turn to Renault herself, from her Oxford years to the readers and writers she influenced. It is written for readers who have finished the book and want to test what stayed with them, for book clubs looking for discussion starters, and for anyone who enjoys classical Athens. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which future fantasy author taught at Oxford while Mary Renault studied there and left a deep mark on her?
J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien lectured there during her years at St Hugh's College in the 1920s, and his rejection of literary modernism impressed her. She later burned a medieval novel of her own, feeling it lacked authenticity.
Q 02Which American president, asked who his favourite author was, replied with the name Mary Renault?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy picked a novelist who was no trained classicist: her Oxford degree was in English. The Last of the Wine was the first of her eight novels set in ancient Greece.
Q 03Which young-adult saga was partly inspired by Mary Renault's Theseus novel The King Must Die?
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games drew partly on her 1958 book, Suzanne Collins has said. Renault had turned the Labyrinth into an arena where captive Athenian youths performed with bulls while wealthy Cretans bet on them.
Q 04Mary Renault wrote The Last of the Wine after emigrating in 1948 to which country, her home until death?
South Africa
South Africa let her live openly with her partner, Julie Mullard, first in Durban and then in Cape Town. She later travelled to Greece but never went back to Britain.
Q 05The Last of the Wine ends with hints of the trial of Socrates, who was later executed with which poison?
Hemlock
Hemlock was the sentence an Athenian jury passed on Socrates in 399 BC, after convicting him of impiety and corrupting the young. Aged 70, he carried it out himself.
Q 06Which rival city-state finally defeats Athens in The Last of the Wine, ending its golden age?
Sparta
Sparta won after 27 years of fighting, and Mary Renault's narrator lives through the hungry siege that forced his city to surrender.
Q 07The postscript of The Last of the Wine says the manuscript's finder commands cavalry for which conqueror?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great later filled a whole Renault trilogy: Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games.
Q 08Before The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault trained and worked through World War II in which profession?
Nursing
Nursing paid her way after her father refused to support her writing, and in 1940 she helped treat evacuees from Dunkirk at a Bristol emergency hospital.
Q 09The Last of the Wine follows Alexias through the final years of which long war fought by Athens?
The Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War ran from 431 to 404 BC, and its great historian, Thucydides, fought in it as an Athenian general before being exiled.
Q 10Alexias, narrator of The Last of the Wine, wins fame in Athens as a champion in which sport?
Running
Running is in his blood: his grandfather competed at Olympia in the same sport, and Alexias hopes to follow him there until a priest's warning ends the dream.
Q 11Which brilliant but reckless general do Alexias and Lysis serve under in the fleet in The Last of the Wine?
Alcibiades
Alcibiades had fled a sacrilege charge and advised the enemy before Athens recalled him. In the novel his carelessness leads the fleet to disaster and sends him into exile once more.
Q 12Alexias's father in The Last of the Wine is reported dead after Athens' doomed expedition to which island?
Sicily
Sicily swallowed the Athenian army in 413 BC, but Alexias's father had only been taken prisoner. He comes home an embittered man and turns on his son.
Q 13Lysis dies in The Last of the Wine fighting near the Long Walls, which linked Athens to which port?
Piraeus
Q 21In The Last of the Wine, which former champion athlete is the stern, conservative father of Alexias?
Myron
Myron writes his son a letter before sailing to war, setting out the qualities to look for in a lover: honour, loyalty and courage.
Q 22At a Panhellenic festival in The Last of the Wine, Lysis is gravely injured competing in which brutal event?
Pankration
Pankration mixed striking and grappling with only two rules: no biting and no eye-gouging. Mary Renault uses the bout to show sport turning into a hunt for crowns at any cost.
Q 23In The Last of the Wine, Alexias and Lysis leave occupied Athens for which city to join the exiles?
Thebes
Thebes, an old enemy of Athens, sheltered the exiles and helped them prepare their return. It later fielded the Sacred Band, an elite corps made up of 150 pairs of lovers.
Piraeus lay about six kilometres from the city, and the parallel walls made a guarded corridor between the two. Lysis falls there as the returning exiles defeat the oligarchs.
Q 14In The Last of the Wine, Alexias's father is murdered under which regime imposed on defeated Athens?
The Thirty Tyrants
The Thirty Tyrants held power for only eight months yet executed some 1,500 people without trial. Their leader had once been a pupil of Socrates.
Q 15Lysis, lover of Alexias in The Last of the Wine, is the title figure of a Plato dialogue on which subject?
Friendship
Friendship is what Socrates and the boy Lysis try, and fail, to define in Plato's dialogue. Mary Renault imagined that boy grown into a champion athlete in his twenties.
Q 16The Last of the Wine brings to life the symposia of classical Athens, which were what kind of gathering?
Drinking parties
Drinking parties followed the evening meal, with wine mixed with water, music, games and talk. Plato set his dialogue on love at one, with Socrates among the guests.
Q 17A priest of Asclepius tells Alexias in The Last of the Wine to stop Olympic training because of which organ?
His heart
His heart, the priest warns, could be harmed by so extreme a regimen, so Alexias lets his Olympic hopes go. The older narrator admits it still troubles him after a hard ride.
Q 18Alexias and Lysis are both chosen to represent Athens in The Last of the Wine at which Panhellenic festival?
The Isthmian Games
The Isthmian Games were held every two years at a sanctuary near Corinth, and their victors once wore a wreath of celery. Alexias wins his event there.
Q 19The Last of the Wine closes by revealing that the unfinished manuscript of Alexias was found by which relative?
His grandson
His grandson, who bears the same name, comes across the long-forgotten pages, a device that lets Mary Renault present her novel as a recovered ancient document.
Q 20In The Last of the Wine, which disaster kills Alexias's grandfather just before the boy's birth?
The great plague
The great plague struck in 430 BC, the second year of the war, and killed about a quarter of the city's people. Thucydides caught it, survived and described it.
Q 24Which pupil of Socrates in The Last of the Wine later wrote the Anabasis, about a Greek army's march home?
Xenophon
Xenophon was elected a leader of ten thousand stranded Greek mercenaries at the age of 30 and brought them out of Persia. In the novel he is one of the young men around Socrates.
Q 25Which follower of Socrates in The Last of the Wine is a war captive sold into slavery at Athens?
Phaedo
Phaedo, a captive from conquered Melos in the novel, is freed with the help of Socrates and his friends. Plato later named his dialogue on the philosopher's last hours after him.
Q 26Which oligarch, once a pupil of Socrates, does Alexias kill in battle near the end of The Last of the Wine?
Critias
Critias, a kinsman of Plato, led the regime that had Alexias's father killed. History records that he fell in that same battle against the returning exiles.
Q 27During the siege in The Last of the Wine, how does Alexias sacrifice his honour to feed his family?
Posing for a sculptor
Posing for a sculptor costs the proud young aristocrat his honour, but it buys food while the blockade is starving the city into surrender.
Q 28The title of The Last of the Wine recalls a custom of tossing wine dregs to form the initial of whose name?
His beloved
His beloved was the person a banqueter honoured with the last drops in his cup. One critic reads the gesture as the novel's lasting image of the depth and brevity of love.
Q 29As a premature newborn in The Last of the Wine, Alexias narrowly escapes which fate his father had ordered?
Left out to die
Being left out to die was what his father decided on seeing how small and frail the baby was. A sudden death in the family interrupted the preparations, and Alexias never forgets it.
Q 30Which Mary Renault novel about wartime servicemen directly preceded The Last of the Wine?
The Charioteer
The Charioteer, her last novel with a modern setting, was held back in America until 1959 because of its positive portrayal of love between men.