Hi everyone! Welcome to 2026.
With the new year comes new opportunity and reflection. And I was reflecting on how I listened to EPIC: The Musical before reading the Odyssey while studying for Certamen.
Which wasn’t that bad of an idea as I had a foundation to build upon while reading the Odyssey. Not to mention that EPIC has some awesome songs!
However–Epic is not perfect. To be expected from adaptations of a work.
Let me make this clear: I mean no hate to Jorge Rivera-Herrans. I know how hard it is to adapt anything, much less a classics work, into a musical!
This blog post is meant to clarify any details for anyone who studies mythology for Certamen or otherwise. So you don’t get sources mixed up!
(Yes I did the shortest saga. If anyone’s interested, or if I’m mad enough, I’ll do other sagas.)
Let’s get started:
The Underworld
- Odysseus doesn’t have a mentioned huge “oh god 558 men dead” moment. He does feel remorse about that, though.
- Not in the song, but worth pointing out Polites made his first and only appearance in the Odyssey when they crew first meets Circe. He couldn’t have died at Polyphemus’s lair. The Odyssey doesn’t state where or when Polites died.
- Anticlea is met only after Odyssues performs a sacrifice of a black ram and ewe (I believe) and talks to Tiresias, who tells him if he wants ghosts to recognize him, he should let them drink from the blood. Odysseus was told to let Tiresias drink first.
- The song lacks Odysseus’s encounters with Elpenor (who asks for burial), Achilles [and Patroclus sort of] (who asks about his son Neoptloemus], Agamemnon (who advises Odysseus to return to Ithaca in disguise), and Ajax Telamon/the Greater (who refuses to speak to Odysseus out of spite from losing to him in the contest to win Achilles’s armor).
No Longer You
- This is one of my favorite songs. However, Tiresias is actually not cryptic at all with Odysseus. He simply tells him that if he wants to make it home alive, he needs to leave Helios’s cattle (found on the island of Thrinacia) unharmed. If he fails to do this, all his comrades will die and he’ll only reach home after much suffering.
- It’s mentioned to hurt Poseidon. Odysseus doesn’t throw hands with Poseidon.
- Only after meeting Tiresias does Odysseus talk to fallen comrades.
Monster
- Odysseus never really reflects this deeply on his journey. He never thinks about Astyanax (son of Hector and Andromache, “The Infant”). After talking with spirits in the Underworld, his crew and him blow the popsicle stand when the other ghosts get agitated and swarm.
- Poseidon doesn’t directly engage with Odysseus’s fleet.
- Technically (being nitpicky here) not all of the Trojans were asleep when killed. They woke up once the town was burning, covered in detail in the Aeneid.
- The death count of men goes from 558 to 500? Considering the Laistrygonians, at most 550 men were lost there. (12 ships for 600 men, 50 men per ship, 11 destroyed, 50 x 11 = 550)
Those are all the inaccuracies I can name off the top of my head! (I did not reference my copy of the Odyssey while making this lol).
However, that should be everything for this saga! Obviously there are other songs, but I chose to do the Underworld saga because I like it.
If there’s anything I missed, let me know 🙂
That’s all bye 😀