The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, book XXIV, lines 605-613 Athena cast a grey glance at her friend and said: “Son of Laertes and the gods of old, Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways, command yourself. Call off this battle now, or Zeus who views the wide world may be angry.” He yielded to her, and his heart was glad. Both parties later swore to the terms of peace set by their arbiter, Athena, daughter of Zeus who bears the stormcloud as a shield— Restoring Harmonia in Ithaca Athena’s intervention at the end of The Odyssey appears at first glance to be tacked on and hastily wrapped up. But a closer reading reveals that her “terms of peace” were necessary to resolve the conflict and restore harmony between the changed man, Odysseus, and the unchanged world of Ithaca. Athena calls Odysseus “master of land ways and sea ways,” which references who Odysseus has become over the course of twenty years at war and wandering. Athena’s words can be interpreted broader than merely land and sea wars. “Master of land ways” could imply that his battles and travels had taught him of the nature of men, who are bound to mortal life in subservience of the gods, while “sea ways” could mean that he understood (as much as a mortal is able) the nature of the gods, who are as unpredictable and dangerous as the seas. By the time he at last returned to Ithaca, he was so different that it was no longer his home. This is the idea behind the Greek word “nostos,” meaning “return home” or “homecoming,” and is often associated with pain or bittersweetness. As “master of land ways and sea ways,” Odysseus was a changed man, and was therefore compelled to change his surroundings to match his new self, and so he led a violent purge of his household to realign his world. He was motivated by the search for “harmonia,” meaning “agreement” and “a fitting together,” but the meaning is deeper than simple tranquility. The Greek term conveys the idea that harmonia is restored after conflict, once the tension has resolved and come into alignment with, or “yielded” to, divine order. The misalignment experienced by Odysseus upon his homecoming was due to the absence of harmonia, and the purge, the great “battle,” was an attempt to bring it back. He was in the process of expanding this purge to the rest of Ithaca when Athena intervened. “Call off this battle now, or Zeus who views the wide world may be angry.” The need to stop Odysseus was due to the difference between “oikos,” the household and the family, and “polis,” the city and the public order. As master of the household, Odysseus had the full power and responsibility to deal out punishments when his household laws were broken. This suggests why Zeus didn’t interfere earlier when Odysseus slaughtered the suitors and unfaithful servants. But even though Odysseus was king of Ithaca, his absolute authority did not extend beyond the household. His power and responsibility for the city was limited to enforcing law, custom, and the public will; a king who goes beyond this becomes a usurper. Zeus, who in this case represents an impersonal party looking at the “wide world” beyond Odysseus, saw that a purge of the polis would not restore harmony but only cause more conflict, and so desired to call off the battle. Hence, Athena ordered Odysseus to “command yourself.” In the past, he had struggles with pride and overconfidence, such as his taunting of Polyphemus the cyclops. But Odysseus had changed over the course of his journey, and was now wiser to men’s ways and gods’ ways. “He yielded to her, and his heart was glad.” This shows that he was more focused on restoring harmonia than on fighting and revenge, and that he was mature enough to listen to and heed the gods. His choice in the crucial moment to submit to the divine order highlights his character growth and humility. In commanding Odysseus to restrain himself, Athena was also yielding to Zeus. She and Odysseus are extremely similar in their intelligence and cunning, which is why she took Odysseus under her wing and became his advocate among the gods. But the words “Athena cast a grey glance at her friend” show that in this moment she was acting not with the heat of red, which the Greeks associated with passion, but out of calm, clear-sighted grey. She was not letting her own emotions impact her judgement. By aligning her will with Zeus’s will, she was restraining herself, acting not simply as Odysseus’s advocate but as a director of order and harmony. And so Odysseus stepped back and the gods intervened, and as a result, “Both parties later swore to the terms of peace set by their arbiter, Athena.” In the modern world, this ending is often considered a “deus ex machina,” a Latin term meaning literally “a god from a machine.” The idea comes from Greek plays where a character playing a god was lifted by an ancient-style crane onto the stage to provide a solution at the end of the play. Today, deus ex machinas are looked down on as a lazy, tacked on plot fix. But the ending of The Odyssey is not a deus ex machina. In his Poetics, Aristotle writes that in order to avoid a deus ex machina “the unraveling of the plot…must arise out of the plot itself.” Precisely, he means that the solution needs to emerge naturally due to the choices of the characters. This is the case in The Odyssey because the relationship between Athena and Odysseus is central to the story, and it was Odysseus’s growth which led him to yield to and trust Athena that brought about the story’s resolution. In addition, because the rightful limits of Odysseus’s kingly authority did not allow for a purge at the polis level, and any attempt to do so would only create more conflict, it was in the hands of the gods to restore harmonia. This was not a failure of Odysseus’s character but a recognition of mortal boundaries. Athena does not cut corners for Odysseus by acting in his place but stands in this scene as a delegate of Zeus “who bears the stormcloud as a shield.” Zeus is the god of cosmic law and order, and this quote implies that he can command the greatest of all powers as a barrier against chaos. Athena is Zeus’s representative, and as such symbolizes the ultimate and rightful authority to restore order and harmonia in Ithaca. Though The Odyssey’s ending may seem abrupt and ambiguous at first, closer scrutiny of Athena’s role as arbiter shows the necessity of divine intervention to resolve the conflict between Odysseus and Ithaca. Her authority from Zeus gives hope that her actions will bring long-term peace and complete Odysseus’s nostos. This reveals the deeper truth that humans, due to mortal boundaries, often do not have the ability to bring about their goals and rely on alignment with divine order to restore harmonia.

I was the girl always hiding in the tree with a book. The one who daydreamed about swords and dragons while others giggled about boys and clothes. My home was in the worlds of "Tuesdays at the Castle," "The Goose Girl," and "Ranger’s Apprentice." My reading tastes, however, weren’t in step with my family’s homeschool philosophy. Mom never discouraged my adventures, but she offered more classic books. She read aloud "Little House" and "Anne of Green Gables," while I refused to listen, and curling tighter into my fantasy stories. One of my favorite authors was Jennifer A. Nielsen. I devoured her medieval and Roman fantasy, though I shied away from her romance. But there came a day when, instead of rereading "The False Prince" for the fifth time, I picked up one of her historical fictions. That day changed my life. I remember once ranting to Mom that memorizing the names of the U.S. presidents was useless and boring. What was the point of history? But "Resistance," "A Night Divided," and "Words On Fire" were different. Through those books, I learned that every name was connected to a person. Nielsen’s characters were people, like me, with families and hobbies and fears. And each individual in the pages of history had a story to tell. Suddenly, I wanted to know their stories. I turned to historical fiction, then history books and biographies. My desire to understand expanded, and I read about government, science, and philosophy. The classics Mom once offered found their place among my favorites. I didn’t stop reading fantasy, but I read it with new eyes. I wrote down leadership attributes in "The Way of Kings," and learned about friendship from "The Lord of the Rings." Instead of hiding in trees and daydreams, I reached out to people I had closed off from before, and I found that we had more in common than I thought. Living people had stories too, and I loved learning them. Jennifer A. Nielsen did more than teach me history; she taught me to love learning. Through that love of learning, I found direction. Purpose. Now, I no longer read to escape. I read to discover who I am and understand the world around me. Her books changed my life, and my goal is to return the favor. I want to be an author who helps teens and young adults feel the thrill of a new idea and the wonder of connecting across centuries. Stories opened doors to new worlds for me, so today, I write to open doors for others.

“Hate” is a bad word in my family. I’ve only used it twice in my life—once to describe the vacuum cleaner (which deserved it), and once for a certain group of girls. I didn’t see these girls often, but everything changed when they showed up. All the other kids, including my friends, gravitated around these girls. They acted more rude and flippant, almost like different people. I realize now that I didn’t hate those girls. I hated the feelings I had when they were around. When I watched Wicked, I saw these same feelings mirrored in Elphaba—loneliness, insecurity, and a need to fit in. I sympathized when she tried to change her behavior to fit in, and I understood what she really felt when she pretended she didn’t care what others thought. Once upon a time, I did the same. C.S. Lewis called this Inner Ringism. It’s the urge to be one of “them” and get into the “in-group.” He compared it to peeling an onion. You might penetrate one Ring, but there will be another, then another, and another. And unlike a real onion, there is no center. You’ll never enter the Ultimate Inner Ring. Pursuing the Inner Ring is the fastest way to wear yourself out and lose yourself. In the quest to impress “them,” a person might do anything—from bullying to drugs to simply choking down who you are to fit in. It’s no wonder so many teens and young adults today feel confused and desperate. But there is another option. It starts with a seed of confidence and relationships not built on Inner Ringism. We see Elphaba genuinely connect with a few people, most notably Glinda. They became true friends, not just linked to each other through the Inner Ring. For me, the shift happened when a couple of new girls moved into my area. We became true friends, and encouraged each other to extend that friendship to others. Together, we built strong relationships that uplifted and strengthened all of us. Elphaba’s journey was more complex. Though she became true friends with Glinda, and others in the school stopped despising her, she still felt the need to fit in. To be “normal.” The Wizard pried into this weakness. Elphaba could join him and be accepted by everyone. If she let go of a couple of core values, she would be loved by the one she thought mattered most. It was all she had dreamed of her whole life. Lewis wrote that “The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it.” In that moment, Elphaba broke her fear of the Inner Ring. She realized that her value wasn’t determined by whether others accepted her or not, or what the Wizard thought. “Too long I've been afraid of losing love,” she sings. “I guess I've lost. Well, if that's love, it comes at much too high a cost.” She recognized that the Inner Ring paled in comparison to real connection—Glinda, Fiyero, Nessarose, Doctor Dillamond, and others who loved her simply for who she was. And with their support, or even without it, she could rise on her own. “And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free.” I’ve felt the hurt of being excluded, and the need to be accepted. But Elphaba rejected the lie of the Inner Ring. She realized she was valuable in and of herself, and had true friends at her back. She chose confidence over insecurity. What’s right over what’s popular. Like her, I choose to defy gravity.

Selection from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (The Republic, Book VII) “Last of [all] he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is… He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?” Plato’s Cave, the allegory of a cavebound prisoner who is forced upwards into the light, is often used as a metaphor for teaching. But beyond a story of a soul journeying to understand truth, this allegory is a declaration that there is a real world and absolute truth outside the cave—a message desperately needed in America today. In the allegory, prisoners are chained in a cave facing toward a blank wall. Behind them is a fire, casting uneven shadows on the wall. The shadows constantly change and blend together, a gray mix of light and dark. Sounds echo from one corner to the other, making it impossible to identify the source. There is no sunshine, only manmade light. To the prisoners, “...the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” This is all they have known and all they believe in. The cave is the real world, and there is nothing beyond the shadows and firelight. America is in this cave crisis today, a morality crisis. Shadows on the wall declare “My truth, your truth,” and “This is me.” Truth is relative. Right, wrong, and conscience are purely the result of one’s upbringing. Any other belief is simple and naive, and doesn’t fit in today’s complex society. The idea of God, or Natural Law, or a universal set of principles, is an outdated perspective. This is postmodernism, where good and bad are subjective or irrelevant. It’s easy to get lost in this gray, shifting world. In the cave, any light that exists is created with our own hands. There is no greater source than what is manmade. The cave is all there is. It is the real world. In another cave, in C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, we hear this same message from the Witch-Queen of the Underland. “The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story… There is no sun.” But in both The Silver Chair and Socrates’s allegory, no sane person doubts the existence of the sunlight. It is clear that those outside of the cave are living in reality, while the prisoners in the cave are trapped in a fake world. One prisoner was forced up to the surface, and he came to understand and love the stars, the moon, and finally the sun. “Last of [all] he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.” The cave that was once everything to him now seemed narrow and petty. The sun is not just a child’s tale or a misled idea: it is the center of the solar system. There is a real center, not just chaos, and that center is the foundation of everything that makes sense and feels right. “He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world…” The sun is the source of all life and truth. All things circle around God or Natural Law. The prisoner’s amazement grows when he realizes that even the shadows on the wall couldn’t exist without light, and the sun is ultimately the source of all light. “...and in a certain way [the sun was] the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?” Every bit of logic or touch of emotion stems from something true, and it is only with the full context of the laws of God or Nature that we can understand how each reason and feeling fits into the world. Undoubtedly, that world exists. The purpose of leaving the cave is to reach the sunlight. Classrooms today tend to focus on the journey of a student: the ignorant prisoners, the absurdity of the illusions, and the pain of stepping into the light of knowledge. Yet teachers and readers often skip over the core wisdom of the allegory, the fact that there is pure light outside the cave. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis wrote that “You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.” Not all ideas melt into shadows—some are solid. Not all light flickers and dies. There is a real world past the shadows, past the fire, and up the stairs. Truth exists, and only the prisoners in the cave will deny its existence.