The Road to Sardis

Lycius was only six when war broke out between his city, Athens, and a confederation of most of the other Greek states, led by Sparta. His chief emotion was rage — that the fighting was bound to be over before he was old enough to bear arms.
But when Lycius had grown to manhood Athens, after an interim peace, was once again at war. Lycius took part in the ill-fated Expedition to Syracuse — a venture that cost Athens the flower of her citizens and most of her ships. The majority of those who survived sickness and wounds in a disastrous campaign, died as prisoners in the Syracusan stone quarries.
Through the intervention of his half-loved, half-hated cousin, Alcibiades, Lycius escaped alive and returned home to share in Athens' final defeat. By then he realised, as Euripides had made clear in his plays, that in a quarter of a century of war, Athens had lost her greatness both as a power, and as a shining moral example to the rest of Greece.
This sensitive story of a young man's development against the background of a brilliant, vanishing world is striking for the way in which it shows that human dilemmas and values are timeless. It is a book that will make an immediate appeal to young people with an interest in and a feeling for history.