Driven out of Argos by his unfaithful wife, Diomedes finds he has attracted the enmity of the gods who he had the temerity to challenge during the ill-fated years of the Trojan War. At Aphrodite’s behest, Poseidon raises a storm that crushes Diomedes’ ship to flinders and strands him on the Island of the Cyclops…and that is just the beginning of the evils the gods have planned for him.

Jenkins evokes the blood and thunder of an earlier age with Homerian prose, recounting tales of manly men doing manly things, and the doom that befalls those men who have the daring to defy the gods.