the hero's wanderings, the novel's middle third finds Neoptolomus back in Rome. Once more he is working for his Roman patron, now as a broker of warehouse space in his patron's several Roman warehouses. After his early education in the sex life of the desert and the barbarian outlands, Neoptolomus finds himself sampling the intricacies of civilized urban sex — as well as negotiating the complexities that arise for him as a gay man trying to have friendships with — and work among — straight men. His several attempts to retrieve the phallos are shown, from Rome to Byzantium, back to Syracuse, and even to the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna. The central third include a drugged Walpurgisnacht among the volcanic peaks and the sad history of a Roman street boy, Maximin, who Neoptolomus wrongly decides is trying to steal from him, though in reality he has been the victim of one of Neoptolomus's jealous lovers. In the final third, years later an older and wiser Neoptolomus returns to Hermopolis, where he meets a young black African, Nivek, sent to the Temple of the nameless god, much as Neoptolomus had been, also to acquire rights to the land across the Nile at Hir-wer — which, since Antinous's death, Hadrian has transformed into the city of Antinoöpolis, now a shrine to the memory of the emperor's late lover, who has officially been declared a god. Here history would seem to repeat itself, only Neoptolomus is in a different role from the one he occupied as a youth. Through this switch in position, Neoptolomus comes to understand a great deal about some of the mysteries around his earlier visit to Hermopolis. Soon, under the pleasures of his committed life-partnership with Nivek, Neoptolomus gives up his search for the phallos. Because of his success both in business and in life — and because they know how much energy in the past Neoptolomus has put into searching for the phallos — many of the couple's friends, however, including a poet, a Christian priest, and a horse-loving adventurer, assume the two, now successful merchants on their own, have secretly found it. Their friends cleave to them in the hopes that they will learn more of the phallos and can perhaps share in its power. Nivek and Neoptolomus run into problems holding their annual orgies in their own summer villa in the Apennines above Rome —