Twenty-five hundred years ago a small Mediterranean community devised a new civic order; the community was Athens and the civic order became democracy. Over almost two centuries Athens struggled to keep its democracy. Previous novels, The Demos at Dawn and The Children of Marathon, have described the early portions of this struggle. The present novel carries the struggle to a close. During the course of this final period, Athenians desperately fought foreign foes and each other, won, lost and suffered through strife, created a thriving commerce and an empire, only to have them lost and then regained and lost again, and produced architecture, art, drama and philosophy unrivaled then or now. This is a story of some men and women of that time, as well as the story of ancient Athenian democracy.