Adventures at Post Oak High

The Odyssey is a text that has the capacity to fascinate scholars from both literary and academic fields alike. It is the rare case of a text over 2,500 years old which has the power to illustrate at least a basic view of daily life in the culture where it originates, and yet it combines that with heartbreaking drama, interesting characters, and epic scenery. Today, fantasy works of all genres (from epic to high to low to dark) have seen some influence from epics such as the Odyssey. But it is the Odyssey itself which truly shows the most influence in the Western canon. The Odyssey is certainly not the first work to exhibit the "Hero's Journey" archetype (*cough* the Epic of Gilgamesh *cough*) but, unlike the aforementioned Mesopotamian work, the Odyssey exhibits more of a traditional Western fantasy story where one hero and his allies face extraordinary odds instead of a villain teaming up with a hero to kill a monster, which is shown in Gilgamesh. Today, the Odyssey...

The story so far: great king of Ithaca, Odysseus, 20 years ago left to sack the sacred heights of Troy. After ten years of conflict, he is one of the few to not return home from the city. Instead, he undergoes a series of unfortunate and mythical adventures through the realm of Hades, witnesses much of his crew be turned into pigs by Circe, the goddess of magic, angers the god of the sun Helios, and encounters the fearsome serpentine Scylla and horrifying Charybdis, a whirlpool monster. He eventually settles on the island of Ogygia, where he is held captive by the beautiful nymph Calypso. After escaping Calypso and being assisted with sailing home by the Phaeacian people, Odysseus finally arrives at Ithaca, but disguises himself as a beggar in order to stealthily aid his son in killing the suitors that aggressively fight for Odysseus' wife Penelope's hand in marriage. In Book 17 of the text, there are several moments which hint at the downfall of the suitors. The bigge...