A detective story taking place in ancient Greece in 404 B.C., when Athens has already trespassed the zenith of its civil magnificence and power and an ominous war against Sparta threatens to burst. If that happened, Athens would have to face two enemies: Sparta, and the wealthy Athenians who hate democracy and hope that a war defeating democratic Athens could restore their power. Phaidon, a young Olympian athlete, offspring of an aristocratic family, is found assassinated. Alcibiades, head of the State-city, suspects that behind that murder there is something disquieting and dangerous. He entrust the chief of the police with the task of finding the murderer at any cost. Nikomakos starts his investigations meeting people, listening to them and trying to build up hypothesis. He asks the famous physician Ippocrates to examine the corpse and learns that Phaidon was suffocated by means of a sheet of papyrus scribbled with political notes. Socrates wants to help Nikomakos to unveil the mystery and shows him the way to. But Plato, on the contrary, seems to obstruct his search. But what does Plato know of the oligarchic conspiracy of some of Socrate's students? And why does he impede the progress of the investigations on the murder of a young man who was his lover? Nikomakos will soon find himself involved in a complicated plot having to do with politics and spreading out of Athens to Sparta and even to Persia. At the end, a famous libel against democracy, The Constitution of Athens, supplies the key to the solution of the mystery, but in the meantime an innocent man has been condemned to death and Athens has already been hit by a cruel war.