"The Mask of Apollo" returns with a difference to the ancient Greece of Miss Renault's "The Last of the Wine."… The difference is of locale and emphasis. The Athens of Socrates and Plato is moved into the background, though it continues to control, or at least color, the political and moral action; and the scene is shifted to Greek Sicily, chiefly Syracuse. (p. 4) The sources for the historical events are relatively late and unreliable, chiefly the choppy "Li...

The gravest and most ubiquitous fault of [The Mask of Apollo] is that stylistic embarrassment which comes from trying to combine a weighty and archaizing tone with the kind of modern colloquialisms which are meant to bring the long-dead to life again. It is easy enough to see how the fault came to be committed, but less easy to excuse it. If all the language used were to be modern—including, presumably, such anachronistic monstrosities as the use of Freudian terminology—then it becomes difficu...

The Mask of Apollo brilliantly combines several major subjects that, stated boldly, sound absurdly incompatible: the Greek theater, the fortunes of Syracuse under tyranny and democracy, the politics of Plato's Academy, the ambiguous nature of virtue in men…. Miss Renault has been "touched by the god," as she might put it. For sheer inspiration must have prompted her to tell the story of Dion through the reminiscence of the actor Nikeratos….