I went to see The Odyssey expecting an epic. And it is.
Gods, monsters, oceans, battles, revenge, love, loss and a man who spends years trying to find his way home. Yet I found myself walking out thinking less about the spectacle and more about Zeus law and the Siren Song.
The first was more a question:
What is my Zeus law?
We all have one, whether we call it that or not.
The rules we make for ourselves. The lines we don’t cross. The principles we try to hold on to, especially when nobody is watching.
For me, it comes down to three words:
Loyalty. Integrity. Ethics.
Loyalty, particularly in friendship.
Because friendship is easy when everything is good. The real test comes when it is inconvenient, when you disagree, when standing by someone costs you something.
Then there is integrity.
Who are you when nobody is looking?
And perhaps the simplest question of all, ethics!
Not “Can I?”
But “Should I?”
That’s my Zeus law. Not perfection. Just a code. Something to come back to when life gets complicated.
But perhaps a code only matters when it is tested.
And that is what brought me to the Siren Song.
This is the part of The Odyssey that shook me to my core.
Odysseus describes the Siren song thus:
“All the things you wanted to be and then all the things you wished you never wished for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch but find it’s under the skin. You can’t reach it.”
I must have replayed this in my mind a 100 times by now. Because perhaps the Siren isn’t offering you something you have never had. It is offering you everything you wanted, everything you lost, everything you might have been.
And then comes the line that really got me: “It was the song of all the promises I failed to keep.”
And finally: “And it told me I don’t really want to go home.”
That is so much more unsettling than a song simply tempting a sailor to his death.
Because The Odyssey is a story about going home. And yet the Siren makes Odysseus question whether home is still where he wants to be.
Perhaps that’s the real power of the Siren song. It doesn’t have to lie. It only has to remind us of the things we haven’t quite made peace with.
We all have our own Siren songs.
The life we imagined.
The road we didn’t take.
The person we thought we’d become.
The promises we made to ourselves and didn’t keep.
And perhaps that’s why a story written thousands of years ago still feels so relevant.
The monsters have changed.
The gods have changed.
But the questions haven’t.
What is the code that guides you when life gets complicated?
And what is the song that still calls to you?
I’m still figuring mine out.
Maybe that’s the point.
The best stories don’t give us answers.
They leave us with questions worth carrying home.
