For Rex Warner, as for Aristotle, man is by nature political--that is, a polis-constituting animal; man without a polis would be "either a beast or a god" (Aristotle's phrase) or at any rate a creature sadly deprived of that rightful, responsible institutional power which is able to secure conditions for the full and good life of its citizens. But "it is men who make the polis, not walls or ships" (as Sophocles, and Thucydides echoing Sophocles, said), and men may be corrupted in the acquisition and exercise of political power. The recurrent theme of Warner's various novels is the tension obtaining between private freedom and public authority, between innovation and tradition, between the individual and the polis.

Allusions to ancient Greece are very much to the point in any consideration of the work of Rex Warner since it is Periclean Athens which seems to have offered him the...