The Oar of Odysseus

Book excerpt: Penelope Bauer sips on a margarita, celebrating her acceptance into the graduate Classics program at Boston University, unaware that she will soon become the central player in a bold scheme to save Western Civilization from itself. Of course, like any intelligent young woman in the dark days of 2018, she sees the symptoms of decay all around her, and the waning of the original values of ancient Greece. The good life for most Americans has become synonymous with the individual drive for wealth and status, acquisitiveness displacing the quest for the classical virtues of wisdom, courage, justice, and the like. Indeed, the small liberal arts college from which she will graduate in a week has fallen victim to the money-grubbing paws of a shady for-profit educational corporation.Penny's decision to pursue the Classics reflects her growing realization that liberal education may be human kind's last best hope. She and her fellow students at the College of St. Francis had the opportunity to experience, many for the first time, the pleasures of a genuinely good life, a moral or ethical life, liberated from the need to acquire the material symbols of success. Her passionate commitment to live such a life made her the unwitting subject of an ancient prophecy. She has been watched, studied without her knowledge. Fate has groomed her to participate in a grand adventure, a wild ride of Homeric proportions, with help along the way from an Irish Setter mix named Sappho, and a bevy of strong, intelligent women--Black and brown, Irish and Greek, gay and straight. And like her ancient namesake, the wife of Odysseus, she will have to depend on an abiding love and her courage, the courage of a woman warrior, to see her through the perils of her own Odyssey.