 Theodore Lambros was born to a working class Greek family, and was admitted to Harvard with no scholarship after graduating from Cambridge Latin School, and thus must work as a waiter to support himself throughout his schooling, and does not have the wherewithal to live on campus.During the course of the book, this fact makes it difficult for him to truly "belong" to his class.All the same, he endures and eventually achieves his ambition of securing a professorship in the classics at Harvard.