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Mary Eva Pedder Ray (1932–2003) was a British author who mainly wrote YA historical fiction set in either ancient Greece or the Roman Empire. She had a BA in classical civilization and an MA in church history. Never a full-time writer, she worked as a church social worker, a welfare worker, and a civil servant in England. She is probably best known today for her five-book early church series: A Tent for the Sun, The Ides of April, Sword Sleep, Beyond the Desert Gate, and Rain from the West. A few of the novels from this series have been reprinted by small presses oriented towards the homeschool market.
Four of the five novels reviewed below are set in ancient Greece and Carthage and one in the Roman Empire. All five would be useful as a literature supplement to a classical curriculum on ancient cultures.
Shout Against the Wind, set in Greece around 1200 BC, tells a story of the Dorian invaders from the north part of Greece, just above what we now call the Gulf of Corinth, who sweep down to destroy the small, peaceful, and prosperous kingdom of Pylos on the southwest coast of lower Greece. What we know as ancient Greece, the great land of Socrates and Pythagoras, come from the eventual union of these two cultures.
Three people escape from the burning palace of Pylos: Melantho, a servant, her mother, Alkis, and Ikaros, a travelling musician. While fleeing, they rescue an abandoned female baby and a young, injured, aristocrat, Kastor and are joined by an ex-soldier of Pylos, Demas, who is strong and kind. They find safety and shelter in an isolated farm belonging to Kastor’s dead father, who was killed in the futile resistance against the invaders. This simple story of survival through the winter and partial healing is told beautifully and ends on a hopeful note of love. Mary Ray describes the setting so vividly it seems like the reader is there with the characters. The main characters are kind and respectful to each other, although in this time in Greece, they are pagans who sincerely appeal to false gods. But human nature has not changed in over three thousand years – the bad and the good. I would suggest a high school reading level, since the author does deal frankly, but respectfully, with evil and suffering of various kinds.
The Golden Bees is set in ancient Greece in about 1450 BC in Sparta and would be appropriate for middle school or high school. This is a fine story, told with all of Mary Ray’s skill and sensibility. Kenofer, a famous bard, tells the tale of how, when he was young, he set out on a quest to find a missing sacred golden bee earring that the Princess of Melos, an island off the Spartan coast, must wear for the festival of the goddess they refer to as the Mistress. (Note: the simple map at the beginning of the book is very helpful, as the quest takes Kenofer up as far as Ithaca, a small kingdom made famous about 500 years later as the home of Odysseus, Homer’s hero of his great epic poem The Odyssey.) The Mistress was a goddess probably something like Demeter or Artemis of the Ephesians. I was thinking of how to characterize this story and why I might recommend reading it. The answer finally came to me – The Golden Bees reads like a Greek myth but told with much more detail and human feeling. Like Shout Against the Wind, it faithfully recreates, at least within the author’s historical knowledge and imagination, the life led in the island of Melos in this time almost 3500 years ago. It is fascinating to remember that around this time, Moses was leading the people of God out of Egyptian slavery towards the Promised Land of Canaan.
One final note: there is an incident in the book where two large jars of olive oil are spilled into the sea as an offering to Poseidon to still the raging waves. The waves were stilled but the characters do not know that this was not intervention by a false god but science – it is known that spreading oil on waves calms them down through reducing the surface tension of the water. Our own Benjamin Franklin did outstanding research on this topic: see https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/oil-on-troubled-waters-benjamin-franklin-and-the-honor-of-dutch-seamen
The Myceneans were the immediate ancestors of what we call the ancient Greek culture, though we would still call them Greeks since they lived in Greece. The flower of this culture was about 1600 to 1200 BC, with the war against Troy being nearly at the end of this culture. The Myceneans themselves looked back to the Minoan civilization on Crete but there was some continuity with the later Greek culture. In Homer’s Illiad, one of the bravest of the Greeks was Diomedes, King of Argos, a small kingdom in southern Greece, who had inherited his throne not from his father but his grandfather, which is a part of the story of Standing Lions. The book is set about ten years before the Trojan War, when Diomedes was only seventeen years old. The story is told in first person by Hipponax, whose father is a steward of one of Diomedes’ estates. Diomedes’ grandfather, the king, has slipped into violent madness and the noblemen give the throne to Diomedes, whose father is dead. There is civil war between the small kingdoms that made up the larger kingdom of Mycenae and Agamemnon becomes the true king of Mycenae, in time for the Trojan War ten years later. There is even treachery by a pagan priestess! Standing Lions feels like a prequel to the Trojan War and it gives a real feel for what the times then might have been like. In this book particularly, Mary Ray as an author comes across as similar in writing style and quality to Rosemary Sutcliff, a better-known author, whose historical fiction novels about Roman Britain are set in a time over 1000 years later. Standing Lions is appropriate for middle school or high school readers.
The Windows of Elissa (middle school to high school) takes place in the time around 300 BC and focuses on Carthage, the great city and empire which came into conflict with Syracuse, a prosperous Greek colony in Sicily, at about that time. The setting of the book is this war. Note that about 150 years later, Carthage fought three wars with Rome that ended in the destruction of its empire and its conversion into a Roman city. Carthage was pagan like ancient Greece but unlike the Greeks, who abhorred the practice, Carthage did have human sacrifice. Elissa and her little sister, Sophi, are the main characters of the book, along with her father, Himilcar, a wealthy merchant, and a number of servants in their household. Their mother died five years before the story opens. The tyrant of Syracuse is at war with Carthage and besieges the great city for more than two years. Elissa and Sophi are confined to their house, trying to survive, along with a visitor, their aunt, who is a priestess of Tanit. Sometimes it is not clear which is more dangerous to the girls, their aunt or the Greek army outside the walls. Mary Ray gives a very realistic picture of life under the harsh gods of Carthage, while still exalting the human spirit of two sisters who love each other more than their duty to the gods of Carthage. The Windows of Elissa is also a vivid picture of what life would be like in a besieged city for the women and girls of the city, which probably has not really changed for thousands of years.
The first four books in this review were set in years ranging from 1600 BC to 300 BC. The Eastern Beacon is set in about 300 AD, starting in Corinth and ending in Wales, with a two-year detour in the Isles of Scilly, which are a small group of islands southwest off the tip of Cornwall. Fabius and Helena, both about fourteen, are shipwrecked on the Isles when their merchant ship is lost in a storm while they were on their way to Isca Dumnoniorum, a Roman city on the south coast of Britain where today’s city of Exeter stands. The struggles that they have surviving as slaves with the primitive, suspicious inhabitants of the Isles make up most of the story, which is full of grimness but with occasional patches of light generated mainly from the determination, loyalty, and care for each other that the two main characters demonstrate. In 300 AD, the gospel had spread to some of Britain but it and most of the Roman Empire were still pagan, as are Helena and Fabius. The Eastern Beacon is a good story for high-school age readers. Like the other Mary Ray books reviewed here, reading it gives one a depiction of life then that seems believable.