The Praise Singer was published by John Murray in 1978. The novel is narrated by Simonides of Keos, the great lyric poet of the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE — a man who lived through the transition from tyranny to democracy, who witnessed the Persian Wars, and whose career spanned the courts of multiple rulers across the Greek world.
Simonides is the “praise singer” of the title — a poet whose profession requires him to celebrate patrons in verse, to make their victories immortal, and to transform their political needs into art. The ethical tension this creates — between the artist’s obligation to truth and his economic dependence on power — is the novel’s central concern. Can a poet who is paid to praise also speak honestly? Is a commissioned poem less truthful than a spontaneous one? Where is the line between celebration and flattery?
Renault follows Simonides from his youth on Keos through his time at the court of Polycrates (the magnificent tyrant of Samos, who embodied both the grandeur and the cruelty of absolute power), to Athens under the Peisistratids (where the murder of Hipparchos by the “tyrannicides” destroyed whatever benevolent tyranny Athens had known), and into the years of the Persian Wars (where his victory odes for Marathon and Thermopylae became the foundation of Greek national memory).
The novel is quieter than Renault’s Alexander books — more reflective, more concerned with old age and memory — and it represents her final extended meditation on art and power before Funeral Games completed the Alexander trilogy.
Collecting The Praise Singer
First edition (John Murray, London, 1978): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- US first (Pantheon, 1978): $10–$30