The lives of two fugitive brothers of successive Phoenician kings become entwined in the villa of the Greek philosopher exile Phaedo, where one fugitive is Phaedo's fourteen-year-old catamite, Hiero, and the other, Prince Xander, brother of the current Phoenician king, is a hidden guest. Hiero and Xander's lives as sometimes lovers continue to intersect over the years of trying to gain the throne.
Brad is a respectable forty-year-old banker in the circus wintering town of Peru, Indiana, but he has a hankering for fourteen-year-old boys. He's working, in postwar 1949, on a scheme to "adopt," with fake papers, one of three boys he covers from a German male brothel, when, in Peru, he happens to come onto a knife-thrower's assistant, fourteen-year-old Alfonso, who has tried to drown himself in the Wabash River.
From the perspective of a bitter, cynical husband and father with a penchant for philandering, this is the tale of how his daughter became his slut on her wedding day, just hours after marrying her beau.
In the mystical warring Greek city states era in the prerecorded mists of time, princes schemed for kingdoms and kings schemed for consolidation of kingdoms in a convoluted maze in maze activity of epic proportions. Fourteen-year-old Nikon is a minor prince faced with scheming to stay alive no less than in becoming king. In epic style this is his story of journeying through this labyrinth.