Her historical novels are all set in ancient Greece. They include a pair of novels about the mythological hero Theseus and a trilogy about the career of Alexander the Great. In a sense, "The Charioteer" (1953), the story of two young gay servicemen in the 1940s who try to model their relationship on the ideals expressed in Plato's "Phaedrus" and "Symposium", is a warm-up for Renault's historical novels. By turning away from the twentieth century and focusing on stories about male lovers in the warrior societies of ancient Greece, Renault no longer had to deal with homosexuality and anti-gay prejudice as social "problems". Instead, she was free to focus on larger ethical and philosophical concerns while examining the nature of love and leadership. "The Charioteer" could not be published in the US until 1959, which made it a somewhat later addition to homosexual literature in the United States because American readers and critics had accepted serious gay love stories in such works as Djuna Barnes' "Nightwood" (1936), Carson McCullers' "Reflections in a Golden Eye" (1941), Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (1948) and Gore Vidal's "The City and the Pillar" (1948).