Richard Papen leaves his hometown of Plano, California, for the elite Hampden College in Vermont to study Ancient Greek. Though Richard is accepted by most of his peers, he finds he cannot enroll into the classes of Classics professor Julian Morrow, who limits enrollment to a hand-picked clique of five students: charming but secretive fraternal twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay; Francis Abernathy, a homosexual whose secluded country home becomes a sanctuary for the group; Henry Winter, an intellectual with a passion for the Pāli canon, Homer, and Plato; and Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, a broke and bigoted jokester who takes advantage of his friends.