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If you got past the title of this post then you, like me, are probably in possession of a useless degree in Literature. Kudos! Dust it off, and let’s chat about Walking Dead.

Last year I suggested to the wife and some friends that I felt AMC’s excellent Walking Dead was a modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, and the second season premiere confirmed this for me. Here’s a few of the parallels (SPOILERS) that I’ve observed:

1. In both stories, the hero (Odysseus/Rick Grimes) is separated from his family and presumed dead.

2. The name Richard means “king” or “leader”: Odysseus is king of Ithaca.

3. In their absence, the heroes’ wives are both pursued by suitors. 

4. In both stories, other men try to become foster fathers to the heroes’ sons. 

5. The stories both involve a katabasis, or a literal journey through the land of the dead- Hades in The Odyssey, post-apocalyptic Atlanta in Walking Dead. 

6. Mermaids-In The Odyssey, mermaids (Sirens), half woman/half monstrous creature, lured the sailors to danger. In Walking Dead, Andrea is drawn to a mermaid necklace in a department store, which she takes and puts around her dead sister’s neck just before she re-animates, a literal transformation into a monster.

7. The Cyclops-Odysseus encountered one of the mythical one-eyed monsters, and there have been numerous references to them in Walking Dead: for example, Andrea kills a zombie with a screwdriver to the eye in the second season opener, just as Odysseus blinded the cyclops Polyphemus with a stake to the eye. 

8. The Laestrygonians-A tribe of giant cannibals in Greek mythology, although not zombies, they ate many of Odysseus’ men in the Odyssey, and thus the horrific theme of death by cannibalistic consumption is present in both tales. 

9. The Stag-one of the most sublime moments in the 2nd season premiere is the appearance of a magnificent buck in the woods, just after Rick asks God for a sign. In The Odyssey, after a demoralizing period on Circe’s island, Odysseus sees a deer, which he takes to have been sent by a god who pities him.

This is a lengthy episode in The Odyssey, one that I’m not going to try to sum up too handily here, but know that it is a passage that many scholars much smarter than me disagree on: some feel the animal represents a man transformed to beast, others feel the encounter with it is an encounter with the wild, a symbolic taming of the frontier, and so on. But what is most interesting to me is the bipartite use of the stag symbol in Walking Dead. 

Rick, his son, and his best friend (and rival) Shane meet the deer in a green clearing together. Shane’s impulse is the same as Odysseus’: he wants to kill it. But Rick stops him, and instead prompts his son to approach the deer peacefully, embracing the beauty of the moment and the very possibility of beauty in a world of horror. It is much like a “green world” in a Shakespearian sense. Then the worst happens: a shot rings out from across the meadow and the deer and the child are both hit. 

Two competing world views were offered to the child from two different father figures: Shane, like Odysseus, thinks the gods demand the sacrifice of the stag. Rick sees the sign in a more modern, Christian way: the sacrifice is not ours to make, and will be (and has in fact already been) made for us. 

Which father was “right” remains to be seen: the previews of the next episode show Rick running, child in his arms, to a welcoming-looking house. Similarly, Odysseus followed chimney smoke to the house of the enchantress Circe, a mansion in the woods which, like the CDC last season, proved to be both a sanctuary and a tomb. 

10. The Journey Home—The most obvious parallel, but also the most direct. Odysseus wanted to return home and was willing to literally go though hell to do it. Rick does as well, as evidenced most poignantly by his insistence on wearing his sheriff’s uniform: a symbol of a government and a body of laws that exist only in Rick’s memory. Tragically, there is no trial that Rick can withstand that will redeem him and the world and earn him his homecoming. Unlike in The Odyssey, the hero of Walking Dead can never go home again.