Athens and Sparta, the mighty city states of ancient Greece, locked
together in a quarter century of conflict: the Peloponnesian War. Alexias
the Athenian was born, passed through childhood and grew to manhood in
those troubled years, that desperate and dangerous epoch when the golden
age of Pericles was declining into uncertainty and fear for the future. Of
good family, he and his friends are brought up and educated in the things
of the intellect and in athletic and martial pursuits. They learn to hunt
and to love, to wrestle and to question. And all the time his star of
destiny is leading him towards the moment when he must stand alongside his
greatest friend Lysis in the last great clash of arms between the cities.