Horses and Heroes: Plato’s Phaedrus and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer

Abstract

Little attention has been paid to Mary Renault’s choice of title for The Charioteer. Reading the Phaedrus, Laurie Odell, Renault’s protagonist, realizes: “In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.” Clearly, the Platonic subtext remains crucial in Renault’s novel. The Phaedrus, in its central allegory proposed by Socrates, offers an erotic choice between the white horse and the black horse and (ideally) the mastery of the two by the charioteer. In The Charioteer, Ralph Lanyon privileges the black horse and exposes Laurie’s love for Andrew Raynes, who embodies mainly the white horse, as insufficient. Renault uses Plato as a model for a love between two young men that offers the good life, a love uncontaminated by the “queerness” of modern homosexuality. However, since the promiscuity of the gay world is, to some extent, anticipated by another participant in the Phaedrus, Lysias, the choice for Laurie is not only between black horse and white horse, but also between Lysian non-eros and Socratic love.