It features a fortress near a waterfall, and is presented as the site of many important character shifts, such as loss of virginity, murder, and transformative religious experiences.

Chaeronea – site of a massive battle which decides whether Philip's military hegemony will be able to spread into the more culturally advanced states of southern Greece.

Phocis' sacrilegious cultivation of fields meant to be reserved as holy land (and the resulting wealth which threatens their neighbours) is the impetus for the Third Sacred War.

A central theme of the novel is whether Philip, who is often portrayed as arrogant, brutish, and crass, deserves the loyalty and love of Alexander.

Leonidas serves as regent of Macedon during one of Philip's absences and seeks to toughen Alexander into an obedient, hard soldier.

Philip, who had been heard earlier singing and yelling drunkenly in the main hall, bursts into the cozy scene & embarrasses Alexander with his nakedness and verbal abuse of Olympias.

When Philip goes to war against Chalkidike, he puts Olympias' cold uncle, Leonidas of Epirus in charge as regent, and entrusts him with finding tutors for Alexander, who is now seven years old and considered ready to begin training for manhood.

Philip is preparing to hear envoys from Athens, who are coming to convince him against joining a war against Phocis, because they are afraid of his increasing power spreading into southern Greece.

His music teacher, Epikrates, encourages him to perform due to his great skill on the cithara, but Philip publicly humiliates Alexander for being too good a musician.

He joins a soldier on leave in a tribal feud in the uplands of Macedon, making his first murder in battle and carrying the head of the victim back to prove his manhood to his father.

Philip leaves to install Alexandros, Olympias' brother, as the new king of Epirus, placing the loyal Antipatros as regent of Macedon.

Back at school, the young men are shocked to hear of the torture and death of Hermias of Atarneus, a friend of Aristotle and loyal ally of Macedon, under arrest in Persia.

Caught up in the heterosexual furor surrounding the Dionysia, Alexander flirts with a serving woman, Gorgo, but later comes upon his father having sex with her.

On the day of the festival, he watches the secret rites of the women on the mountaintop, although it is forbidden, and sees his mother murder Gorgo in her role as priestess of Dionysos.

Sick with shame for having watched something forbidden, Alexander reasons that his mother has the right to wage war in the way of women just as his father does in the way of men, and that Olympias has actually killed far fewer people than Philip.

When they return to the capital from school, the circle of men around Alexander are noticed to have taken up the southern Greek fashion of shaving, something which Philip views with distaste.

As regent, Alexander practices military skills himself and studiously trains the soldiers left to him, making them ready when he puts down a rebellion in Thrace.

There, he saves his father's life but Philip, ashamed, pretends to have been unconscious and to not remember it, losing some of the loyalty he had earned from Alexander in their shared battle plans.

The next morning he sends the woman back to his mother with an expensive pin which Olympias had told Alexander to save for his bride someday, and the message that from now on he will choose his own lovers.

Alexander is shocked that his father is insulting Pausanias by making him stay the night at the home of his former rapist, but Ptolemy points out that the king has much else to think about and has probably put the event long out of mind.

In Epirus, Alexander consults the oracle of Dodona, under the auspices of three priestesses reminiscent of the Moirai, and is given the answer of "yes" to two questions which the novel leaves a secret.

Olympias' own spies learn that Philip plans to marry Arridaios, the developmentally disabled son of a minor wife, off to the daughter of a ruler on the edge of the Persian Empire.

Convinced that the prestigious marriage is meant as a slight to him, Alexander proposes himself to the foreign ruler as an alternate bridegroom through the secret negotiations of Thettalos, an admiring actor.

Olympias hints at a new intrigue she has developed to bolster her position, but, fearful of Philip's retribution, Alexander refuses to hear it.

He sends for an oracle from Delphi concerning his invasion of Asia and receives the seemingly positive response, "Wreathed is the bull for the altar, the end fulfilled.

Alexander takes control of the guard, setting himself in position to claim the throne by the next novel in the series, The Persian Boy.

The novel has been criticised as an overly romanticised and sanitised portrait of Alexander, who is shown as exceptionally athletic, beautiful, charismatic, and talented, as well as relatively compassionate for his time.

[3] Renault's portrayal of Alexander's society, however, has been noted for its historical accuracy and sound scholarship in "dealing realistically but unsensationally with the life and mores of the Hellenic world..." Gene Lyons noted in the New York Times Book Review, that, "As a historical novelist writing about the ancient world, Mary Renault has few peers.

[6] Daniel Mendelsohn said that both her "contemporary and the Greek novels feature unsettling depictions of bad marriages and, particularly, of nightmarishly passive-aggressive wives and mothers.

As a result of this minute attention to stylistic detail, the novels can give the impression of having been translated from some lost Greek original.