The New Herakles

What if the spirit of Don Quixote appeared in a seventeen-year old youth living in Egypt in the third century of the Christian era? An Egypt that was largely Greek by descent and in its language and culture? And instead of setting out to renew the age of chivalry by becoming a knight errant, as the man from La Mancha did some thirteen centuries later, he wished to do great deeds such as Herakles performed in his legendary Twelve Labors a thousand years earlier? The year A.D. 268 fell in the midst of a troubled age of the Roman Empire, wracked not only by insurrections and barbarian invasions, but also by plague, which wiped out half the population in many places. Travel was difficult and dangerous. But a resolute few were determined to make the journey and compete in the two hundred and sixty-second Olympiad which began the following year.