EPIC: Reimagining the Odyssey with Women Characters That Don’t Suck

Image; Jorge Rivera-Herrans

EPIC’s creator, Jorge Rivera-Herrans, started putting up videos on TikTok for their concept album back in December of 2022. Based on Homer’s The Odyssey — the classic Greek tale of the warrior Odysseus trying to find his way back home in the face of Gods and monsters — Jorge Rivera-Herrans retells this story as an upbeat pop musical. The central tension is his main character, Odysseus (sung by Jorge Rivera-Herrans himself), trying and failing to maintain his humanity in the face of many challenges.

I loved this concept album. The music composition is impressive, with Rivera-Herrans harkening back to Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf by associating each central character in EPIC with a different type of instrument: piano for Athena, guitar for Odysseus, lyre for Hermes, and so forth. All of it adds a sense of cohesion that allows the listener to quickly jump back into the story in between updates or “sagas.”

This musical updates a story that, by all accounts, has some quite sexist elements to it and adds a level of depth and humanity to its female characters that is refreshing to see.

The before and after

I havetalked previouslyabout the sexist nature of many Greek myths and stories, but to reiterate, the ancient Greek city-states were, by today’s standards, quite misogynistic places. Married women in Athens, for example, were under the complete authority of their husbands (note: if you want to do a deeper dive, Prof. Jorunn Økland has anhour-long YouTube lectureon the notion of equality in ancient Greece).

The Odyssey was a reflection of those ideals. While there were divinely feminine figures in this story, such as Athena, many women fell into the dichotomy of either faithful servants (see Odysseus’s wife Penelope) or some variant of temptress that our male protagonist had to overcome.

For example, the character Calypso — daughter of the Titan Atlas— traps Odysseus on an island for seven long years. Zeus then forces her to release him. In the original story, she highlights the double standard of not being able to take a mortal man as her lover in the same way the male Gods can, but she ultimately acquiesces to this hierarchy, providing Odysseus with food and everything he needs to make a raft to leave her island. As Laurent Ziment reflects:

“In the Homeric epochs, a clear gender hierarchy is established with gods at the top, followed by mortal men, followed by goddesses, and finally mortal women. In this hierarchy, though goddesses have the same ilk of power as the gods and are by far much stronger than the mortal men, gender roles push them down in the hierarchy, prioritizing the Greek patriarchy over sheer power…In this scene, the ability to fully speak one’s mind with a valid argument is trumped by the gender hierarchy, something that is often seen throughout the epochs.”

In EPIC, we do not have the same reverence for the Gods, so instead, Calypso’s fate is depicted as less of a natural hierarchy she must follow and more of something she has been forced into. In the song Not Sorry For Loving You, she tells Odysseus that she has been trapped on this island for most of her life, with no one for company, singing

“I spent my whole life here
Was cast away when I was young
Alone for a hundred years
I had no friends but the sky and sun”

It’s not great, ethically speaking, that she trapped Odysseus, but this recontextualization makes her decision less about her being a God angry that she cannot take advantage of mortals in the same way male Gods can and more about the isolation imposed on her by her fellow immortals.

She is now a tragic figure rather than a petty, vindictive one.

Another update is with Circe, the witch who turns members of Odysseus’s crew into animals. It’s been argued that in the original myth, she is a warning to men about the dangers of feminity. Hermes explicitly warns against succumbing to her wiles, and as a consequence of not resisting them, Odysseus and his crew lose a year on her island. As Marica Felici argues in The Collector:

“Circe is a concubine that uses her sensuality to lure men into her trap. She transforms those men she does not like, while seducing those she fancies. She is aware of her ability to charm and uses it on Odysseus who loses his desire to return home. Thus, Circe is the mistress who has the power to make the hero forgets about his oikos (“household”) and wife. Therefore she is the prototype of the femme fatale, a woman who has the power to catalyze and absorb men’s desires and energies. She is able to convince Odysseus to stay with her in Aeaea by offering him a life full of pleasure.”

However, EPIC’s Circe has a motivation for her hostilities beyond the perils of her feminity. Her decision to attack Odysseus’s crew is rooted in her painful experiences with other men in the past. As she sings in Done For:

“My nymphs are like my daughters
I protect them at all costs
The last time we’ve let strangers live
We faced a heavy loss.”

I empathize with her and her decisions because she is just as much a victim as an aggressor.

This empathizing with the feminine applies to even the more extreme examples in the Odyssey. Take the sirens—another peril of femininity. These monsters try to lure sailors to their deaths with enchanting songs. The central theme of the siren epoch is overcoming temptation, with Odysseus instructing his crew to tie him to the mast of his ship so he can still listen to their song without succumbing to it.

The Sirens don’t have a better motivation in EPIC, still trying to lure his crew to their deaths, but instead, the thing that has changed is Odysseus. Following the Underworld Saga (see Monster), he has decided to become crueler so that he can do what is “necessary” to get home to his wife and child, and as a result, he mercilessly slaughters all the sirens. Odysseus and his crew singing in Different Beast:

“We are the man-made monsters
We are the ones who conquer
You are a threat no longer
We won’t take more suffering from you.”

Whereas in previous parts of the story, he would have tried to find a less violent solution (see his preservation of the Cyclops), his destruction of the sirens is not depicted as a masculine triumph like in the original but rather a reflection of how far he has fallen.

I could keep on listing examples. From the emotional arc of Athena to the haunting motivations of Scylla and many more, it was refreshing to see how this musical recasts the motivations of this story’s female characters. They were no longer trite lessons on the dangers of feminity but instead three-dimensional characters with their own wants and desires.

An epic conclusion

With the fantastic conclusion of the Ithaca Saga, I want to make clear that I appreciate EPIC for its strong vision. Jorge Rivera-Herrans was willing to remix and remove parts of the original story that no longer appealed to modern sensibilities, and in an era where everyone has been decrying “wokeness,” that was not an easy thing to jumpstart a brand on.

This praise doesn't mean I found this musical perfect regarding gender. For all the agency and backstory granted to this story’s divine woman, its two mortal woman characters spent their time waiting for our hero—one of them even dying in the process (see Odysseus’s mother, Anticlea, in the song The Underworld). Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, was played fairly traditionally, with her choosing to be with him at the end.

There was no real reinvention to her story whatsoever.

Yet, this nitpick aside, I mostly enjoyed this tale. We are constantly reimagining the past, and withEPIC, I see our modern sensibilities seeping through the cracks of an ancient, hierarchical story, and that makes me feel slightly better about the present.