The Glory That Was
L. Sprague de Camp
 Twenty-seventh century Earth is united by a worldwide democratic government presided over by a constitutional monarch, though the former is veering toward totalitarianism and the latter is a megalomaniac. To neutralize the World Emperor the power-hungry prime minister has ceded to him control of Greece for use in a mysterious secret project. Now Greece is surrounded by a force field cutting it off from the rest of the world, and people of Greek descent everywhere have vanished, presumably spirited away to the isolated region by the Emperor's agents. One such kidnapped citizen is Thalia, wife of classical scholar Wiyem Flin. Anxious to get her back, he recruits his friend, magazine editor Knut Bulnes, into a desperate attempt to penetrate the force barrier. Bulnes, hoping to obtain an exclusive story on the Emperor's mysterious project, agrees. The two succeed, sailing a boat through the barrier when it is temporarily disrupted by a storm. Inside the force field, Flin and Bulnes are astounded to find themselves not in 27th century Greece at all, but to all appearances the Classical Greece of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War. Pretending to be foreign philosophers, they establish themselves in Athens as they attempt to unravel the mystery, and begin to discover that all is not as it seems; the wife of the playwright Euripides, for instance, is a dead ringer for Thalia, though if she is Thalia she has no memory of her life with Flin, nor does she recognize him. But the true shock is when Pericles, the leading citizen of Athens, turns out to be the Emperor! Somehow, the two outsiders must uncover what he has done to Greece and how, thwart his insane scheme, and unmask the conspiracy that threatens to turn Greece back three thousand years and the rest of the world into a police state. Not to mention their original object of recovering Thalia!