Pen, Hex, Ash, Ez, and Venice are living on hard work, companionship, and dreams in the pink house by the sea until a foreboding ship arrives and all start having strange visions of destruction and violence then, trance-like, they head for the ship and their new battles, with Pen using Virgil's epic Aeneid as her guide.

Vergil's Aeneid has been considered a classic, if not the classic, of Western literature for two thousand years. In recent decades this famous poem has become the subject of fresh and searching controversy. What is the poem's fundamental meaning? Does it endorse or undermine values of empire and patriarchy? Is its world view comic or tragic? Many studies of the poem have focused primarily on selected books. The approach here is comprehensive. An introduction...