Question: Are the "Odyssey" and "The Consul" fundamental to the modern Western canon?

Context articles: The Consul
Modern Western square dance
Traditional square dance
Penguin Classics
A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas
Canon law of the Catholic Church
The Canon (podcast)
Odyssey
Western canon
Square dance club

The Consul is an opera in three acts with music and libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, his first full-length opera.
Modern Western square dance (also called Western square dance, contemporary Western square dance, modern American square dance or modern square dance) is one of two American types of square dancing, along with traditional square dance.
 As a dance form, modern Western square dance grew out of traditional Western dance.
 The term "Western square dance", for some, is synonymous with "cowboy dance" or traditional Western square dance.
 Therefore this article uses the term "modern Western square dance" to describe the contemporary non-historical dance which grew out of the traditional dance.
Traditional square dance is a generic American term for any style of American square dance other than modern Western.
 The term can mean (1) any of the American regional styles (broadly, Northeastern, Southeastern, and Western) that existed before around 1950, when modern Western style began to develop out of a blend of those regional styles, or (2) any style (other than modern Western) that has survived, or been revived, since around 1950.
Penguin Classics is an imprint published by Penguin Books, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House.
 They are published in varying editions throughout the world including in Australia, Canada, China, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
 Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades from its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated the Penguin English Library imprint in 1986.
 The first Penguin Classic was E. V. Rieu's translation of "The Odyssey", published in 1946, and Rieu went on to become general editor of the series.
 Rieu sought out literary novelists such as Robert Graves and Dorothy Sayers as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste."
A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas (1952) is a two-volume index, published as volumes 2 and 3 of Encyclopædia Britannica’s collection "Great Books of the Western World".
 Compiled by Mortimer Adler, an American philosopher, under the guidance of Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, the volumes were billed as a collection of the 102 great ideas of the western canon.
 The term “syntopicon” was coined specifically for this undertaking, meaning “a collection of topics.”
 The volumes catalogued what Adler and his team deemed to be the fundamental ideas contained in the works of the Great Books of the Western World, which stretched chronologically from Homer to Freud.
 The "Syntopicon" lists, under each idea, where every occurrence of the concept can be located in the collection’s famous works.
The canon law of the Catholic Church (Latin: "jus canonicum" ) is the system of laws and legal principles made and enforced by the hierarchical authorities of the Church to regulate its external organization and government and to order and direct the activities of Catholics toward the mission of the Church.
 It was the first modern Western legal system and is the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West, while the unique traditions of Oriental canon law govern the 23 Eastern Catholic particular churches "sui iuris."
The Canon is a weekly audio podcast on Earwolf which began airing on November 3, 2014.
 Each week Devin Faraci and Amy Nicholson, of "MTV News", discussed films they believed to be worthy of "The Canon".
 "The Canon" is a list of films that the audience votes to decide whether it is one of "the greatest films of all time", similar to the Western Canon.
 Some episodes compare two films head-to-head.
The Odyssey ( ; Greek: Ὀδύσσεια "Odýsseia", ] in Classical Attic) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer.
 It is, in part, a sequel to the "Iliad", the other work ascribed to Homer.
 The "Odyssey" is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second-oldest extant work of Western literature; the "Iliad" is the oldest.
 Scholars believe the "Odyssey" was composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.
The Western canon is the body of books, music, and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture.
 It includes works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art, sculpture, and architecture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit and representing the high culture of Europe and North America.
 University of California philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".
 The Bible, a product of Middle Eastern culture, has been a major force in shaping Western culture, and "has inspired some of the great monuments of human thought, literature, and art".
Square dance clubs are the primary form for organization within the recreational activity of square dancing, and more specifically modern Western square dance.
 This article's focus is the modern Western square dance club, and it is understood in the context of this article that when the terms "square dance club" or "square dance" are used it refers to the form of square dance called "modern Western square dance".