"A spellbinding blend of myth, legend, history and imagination, here is Mary Renault's famous novel of Theseus, a prince of ancient Greece said to have been conceived of a union between a royal priestess and the powerful god Poseidon. It is the story of a boy in search of his heroic birthright: of a young man whose strange moira, or fate, was to be revealed in the deadly bull ring and decadent courts of Crete, in the arms of women royal and lowly, in extraordinary adventures that challenged his passion, wit and daring, and in a strange kingdom where the mother goddess ruled as queen and the king was a lustily pampered consort condemned to death at the end of his rears reign..." -- Page 4 of cover.