What Do We Render to Ruthless Gods?

Poseidon by joneevarts @ tumblr

I was late to the party with EPIC, a new musical concept album about the Greek hero Odysseus that has taken the internet by storm. It wasn’t until last fall that I started hearing rave reviews about its compelling story-telling. Only, I dragged my feet to engage because The Odyssey is not a story I find particularly inspiring. When I finally started listening, I was wowed by the music and devastated by the first two numbers, so it took awhile to get back to it. This was clearly shaping up to be a tragedy, and I just wasn’t eager for that. 

When I finally got past the first two numbers, I was hooked, captured by the tension between Odysseus’ desire to respond to the humanity in everyone (or, well, personhood in the case of non-humans like the cyclops), and the pressure he was under from the gods to destroy his enemies. The Greek gods created such an interesting dilemma for the ancient world. They were to be obeyed, worshipped and pacified, but they were not generally good. So what did you do if the gods were demanding something of you that violated your sense of what was right? That question drives the entire musical, and its resolution is what I’m going to focus on in this newsletter, even though one could write books about EPIC and creator Jorge Rivera-Herrans’ adept use of structure, attention to energy curves, musical brilliance, groundbreaking marketing strategy, clever mixing of genres, and a number of other fascinating details, including his encouragement of fan art, some of which is featured here. 

It occurs to me that the closest modern equivalent to the gods of Odysseus' time would be the people who’ve gathered enough power (tyrants, billionaires, etc) that they can basically run things today without consideration for the rights and needs of others. With EPIC, I was hoping we were heading toward a message about the necessity of defying the ruthless demands of the powers that be, in order to achieve peace within ourselves and with each other. Although it became clear that Odysseus was going to lose himself to the gods’ demands, I expected a conclusion that would leave him and the audience longing for what could have been, had he found the courage to hold fast to his humanity at all costs. 

Alas, that’s not how the musical plays out. It is structured as a hero’s journey and Odysseus gets his happy ending. The cost to his humanity is never fully weighed. Instead the implicit message I hear is that, in order to succeed, you need to grow into the capacity to be at least somewhat ruthless. There’s also a nod to the idea that it’s unfortunate that this is how the world is set up. But that’s a problem for the uber-powerful to work through. Our job is to do what we must so we can secure what matters to us. 

EPIC creator Jorge Rivera-Herrans

In creator Rivera-Herrans’ own words, ‘ruthlessness is the main theme of EPIC” and Odysseus’ decisions about whether or not to embrace it form the core of his journey. 

“On one far end of the spectrum of ruthlessness - on the opposing end - would be his best friend Polites, who believes that we should always greet the world with open arms, no matter what. On the far other end is Poseidon, who believes to his core that ruthlessness is mercy upon yourself… that if you’re ruthless towards any problem that you confront, you’ll be more efficient and able to eliminate it and thus it will not come back to haunt you later…

"And the reason why this theme of ruthlessness is so important is because it haunts Odysseus in every single song… Odysseus spends a lot of his time questioning whether being ruthless would turn him from a man into a monster, Poseidon believes that Odysseus would just save himself all the trouble if he just accepted ruthlessness as a necessity of life." 

It starts in the very first song, “The Horse and the Infant”  which does the work of an opening number and an “I Want” song, while also giving us the inciting incident that changes everything. We learn that our hero has been away from his wife, Penelope, and their then-infant son, Telemachus, for 10 interminable years. All he wants is to put an end to the Trojan War and get home to them. But first, Zeus orders him to kill the infant son of Troy’s crown prince. Otherwise, the boy will grow up to avenge his father on Odysseus’ family. But couldn’t he be raised as Odysseus’ own, or placed somewhere safe, with no knowledge of his history? “Don’t make me do this,” Odysseus begs. Zeus answers, “The blood on your hands is something you won’t lose.” Other gods join in, “All you can choose is whose.”  

In “Just A Man” Odysseus then pleads with the baby in his arms, explaining his powerlessness to resist the gods’ demands. The boy reminds him of Telemachus, but Odysseus is just a man who would trade the whole world to see his son and wife. There’s one question that torments him while he asks forgiveness and prepares to throw the baby off a tower: “When does a man become a monster?”

Odysseus' best friend Polites (by Mirscy) greets the world "with open arms"

It’s ironic that this is the only innocent blood that Odysseus spills in the entire story. Every life he will claim or abandon from this point forward is guilty, to some degree. It’s not the quantity or the quality of the blood he spills that seems to define how he is changing. It’s his fall from resisting bloodshed and valuing the lives of others alongside his own, to his abandoning everyone but himself and then embracing vengeance. At the beginning of his homeward journey, he spares the life of the cyclops who has killed his best friend, Polites (the one who was teaching him to greet the world with open arms). He knows that his exercise of mercy will infuriate Athena, who has been telling him to turn off his heart so he can become the greatest of warriors. But he’d rather sleep at night. Even at the cost of losing Athena’s support, and despite the cyclops exploiting Odysseus’ mercy to turn Poseidon’s wrath against him, Odysseus seeks to befriend, rather than kill, those who oppose him until the end of Act I. Then he’s persuaded that his refusal to be ruthless has caused all the losses his crew has endured so far. And the only way he’s getting home is, according to a legendary prophet, by becoming someone new. In “Monster” he sings “If I became the monster to everyone but us/ And made sure we got home again/ Who would care if we're unjust?” He decides he’d drop another infant to its death in order to get his crew back home. For them, he’ll embrace ruthlessness. 

It doesn’t work that way. Ruthlessness has a way of tainting all one’s relationships, not just one’s dealings with sirens, sea monsters and other potential enemies. Odysseus learns to kill first and ask questions later.  But there’s a cost in how he comes to value others. Earlier, he would willingly risk his life for any of his men. Now, he sacrifices six of them in order to get himself and the rest of his crew out of danger. This loses him the trust of his men. They mutiny, then slaughter a sacred cow against his advice, enraging the gods. He is given the choice between consenting to their deaths at Zeus’ thunderbolt, or dying in their place. He consents to their deaths and is left the sole survivor. Eventually, he gets hold of Poseidon’s trident and brutally tortures the sea god in “Six Hundred Strike,” until the god calls off the storm that bars the way to Ithaca.

“After everything you’ve done… how will you sleep at night?!” Poseidon groans. 

Odysseus replies, “Next to my wife.” 

Antinous (by Tododokii), riles up his fellow suitors

But first, there are more people to kill. His would-be successors have grown weary of waiting for Penelope to choose one of them as husband and king. “Odysseus” catches them plotting to kill Telemachus and to rape Penelope. He picks them off, one at a time, hunting them through darkened corridors. One has time to plead for forgiveness; their ring-leader is dead, could he not trade bloodshed “for open arms instea-.” Odysseus shoots him before he can finish the word. Telemachus joins the fray, but without a thirst to kill. He offers clemency to a suitor if he’ll drop his weapons and flee. But the suitor takes the prince hostage only to be stabbed, then beheaded, by Odysseus. This song was originally titled “King” but then got changed to “Odysseus.” Of the musical’s 40 songs, only 3 others bear a personal name: “Polyphemus,” “Scylla,” and “Charybdis;” all of them are monsters.  

When all the suitors are dead, Athena appears with an apology. She’s hasn’t been sleeping well and she “Can’t Help But Wonder” whether Odysseus was right and the world would be better with less violence and more empathy. But for Odysseus, that world is no longer a remote possibility. He’ll leave Athena to work on it. He’s got a girl to see. 

Odysseus and Penelope reunite, by Dexy on X

Then he enters Penelope's room, and confesses he’s not the man she fell in love with. He asks “Would You Fall In Love With Me Again?” then relates how he “left a trail of red on every island as [he] traded friends like objects [he] could use.”  But all of these are things he can’t undo, and it was all done in order to get back to her. She seems to reject him, asking him to move their wedding bed out of her room. He begins to grow angry, protesting that the bed is not moveable; it was carved into the olive tree under which they met. She rejoices that he passed the test, because only her husband knew that, and declares she will fall in love with him over and over and over again. He has not changed. He is her husband. And she’s been waiting so long. Then they fall into each other’s arms.

The song is beautiful. The exhausted relief in both voices brings me to tears. But I’m also acutely uncomfortable because we have seen sufficient evidence of Odysseus' spiritual decline, that I don’t think he’s still a safe object for Penelope’s unreserved devotion. He seems to think he is, because he did it all for her. But he also told himself he was embracing ruthlessness for the sake of his men – to bring them home – and then, he himself says he traded them all away like objects, to get back to her. And he doesn't seem to regret making that choice, at least, not enough to do differently if he had to choose again. So is she what he values above all else, or is it having her? Can we trade away our ideals for the love of somebody and still define what we feel for them as love? Or does it, inescapably, become something darker as we come to believe that we have bought them at the price of our integrity? Who stands in the place of the “kind and gentle husband” that Odysseus tells Penelope is lost? Will the monster he’s become, in order to return to her, honour her autonomy? Or will she discover that her adoration is required to appease him?  

These issues are hardly hinted at, maybe because we want a happy ending and we’re eager to believe that love conquers all. But maybe we’re getting a skewed picture of love. Perhaps the curtain falls before we see the full price of Odysseus’ choices. Are we settling for the illusion that unconditional love can save a broken hero, who caved to the pressure of the powerful and lost himself in the process, because we haven’t dug deep enough into the themes?

Is there a way to reject all forms of ruthlessness, without being too ready to trust, like Polites, and falling prey to monsters ? Can we greet the world with open hearts (instead of arms) and discerning minds, by honouring everybody’s humanity while not giving trust that hasn’t been earned? And if we stand together, can we resist the pressure of a broken society that urges us to treat our opponents as objects, and tells us that we have no choice but to commit atrocities against each other? 

Athena by Auroraistic

Is it the job of the mighty, our modern-day Athenas, to fix the broken world we inhabit? Or can we ourselves become mighty, together, if we refuse to sell our souls? Those are the questions I was hoping EPIC would encourage us to explore. But I think that final scene between Penelope and Odysseus puts too tidy a bow on the ending to invite that. 

I would rather have heard something like Odysseus scolding Telemachus for offering mercy to one of the suitors, and beginning to teach him that ruthlessness is mercy on ourselves. I’d like to have Penelope interrupt them, aghast at this intruder who wears her husband’s face but tells her son to shut off his heart. I’d like to hear her demand that Odysseus prove his identity by stringing his fabled bow, and Odysseus proving unable to do so because, in sacrificing his compassion, he has cut himself off from the source of his strength. She could grieve when she heard his story and show him compassion and caring, but not accept him as her husband until he has become again a man she can trust, the man she married. As he and Athena mentor his son, he could learn to bitterly regret cultivating the monster, recover his compassion and with it, his strength. And then, we could have that beautiful song. 

I guess that wouldn’t really be true to the source material. But I think it would be a truer, and more inspiring, story. I’ve heard some other ideas for how this tale might have ended with a brighter message. Do you have any? Or do you see a brighter message that I’m missing? Please share your thoughts in the comments here. 

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