Rome 108 AD: A teeming city of splendors and squalor, where millionaires enjoy everything money can buy, while the poor scrabble to survive, their only distractions brutal gladiatorial games and the races of the Circus Maximus. After a chance encounter the lives of two diverse young men intertwine. Streetwise Tullius Rufio and patrician Quintus Alba could not be more different, but events conspire to link them first in friendship, then in desire .....