The Blood of Olympus

Riordan continues to alternate between the two quests. Jason’s opening four chapters about the demigods on the quest to Athens are followed by four chapters from Reyna’s point of view about the quest to deliver the Athena Parthenos to Camp Half-Blood. This sets up cliffhangers designed to create suspense. Jason’s chapters end with his losing consciousness, and Reyna’s chapters end with her reaching out her hand to Leo. Although it may be reasonable to expect Jason and Reyna to survive, these cliffhangers create ambiguity about how they’ll survive.

In these chapters, Reyna recalls her flying horse, or pegasus, Scipio dying in her arms, which occurred in The House of Hades. This sets up her later experience with Pegasus himself in Chapter 37, when he reveals that he answered Hedge’s call for help to honor Reyna’s bond with and care for Scipio. Reyna’s growth journey throughout the novel is to come to terms with her feelings of failure as a Roman leader, which speaks to the theme of The Makings of a Good Leader. She feels tremendous responsibility and is very hard on herself, at times failing to account sufficiently for the positive impact that she has because she blames herself for outcomes that she can’t control. One of these is what happened with her father, which is revealed in Chapter 29. Her fear of ghosts, mentioned in this section, foreshadows her encounters with her ancestors’ ghosts in Chapter 24.

In addition to incorporating Greek mythological narratives, Riordan draws on Roman myth and history. In Greek mythology, satyrs are figures of duality, both comical and wise, and they’re closely associated with Dionysus. Their Roman counterparts are fauns, which retain the comical element but not as much the wisdom. Riordan highlights this difference through Coach Hedge’s taking offense when he’s mistaken for a faun. Back at Camp Jupiter, Octavian has disobeyed Reyna’s order and has elevated himself to pontifex maximus, “high priest to the gods,” meaning that he has set himself up as being “almost to the level of emperor” (53). In Roman history, Octavian was the leader who became the first Roman emperor, taking on the name Augustus Caesar, and he named himself pontifex maximus in the year 12 BC. Riordan’s Octavian is a descendant of Apollo, who was also the patron god of Augustus.

These chapters take place in Pompeii, the site of a devastating volcanic eruption in 79 BC that buried the city and anyone in it under mountains of ash. The ash acted as a kind of preservative, enabling historians, scholars, and archaeologists to learn a great deal about this Roman city in the first century BC, but it also raised ethical questions about how to treat the dead, since the ash preserved bodies—or the position of bodies that subsequently decomposed while encased in ash—where they fell.