Some ancient histories

Usage examples of epics.

It is the first of these two Epics, the Iliad of Ancient India, which is the subject of tile foregoing pages.

No work in Europe, not Homer in Greece or Virgil in Italy, not Shakespeare or Milton in English-speaking lands, is the national property of the nations to the same extent as the Epics of India are of the Hindus.

I hope that it will draw an audience either of first-time readers who are a little afraid to face Homer directly and would like some clues to approaching his poetry, or of readers who come away from their first reading of Homer with a strong sense that there is much more to the epics than early acquaintance reveals and who would like some help discovering what it might be.

In any case, the epics were completed when their events were distant memories, insofar as they were facts at all.

Homeric epics presented in the forty-eight chapters of this book is not helped much by the two and a half thousand years of ingenious speculation on the Homeric question, but it might, quite incidentally, add one more opinion to them.

I would like, really incidentally, to demonstrate a way of reading the epics that will, I think, make more such things reveal themselves.

He wrote perhaps two and a half centuries after Homer but in his style: a poem in dactylic hexameter, brief where the epics are long, having as its hero the writer, where the Homeric epics are anonymous.

The Athenians, who first established and introduced into their ceremonies a canonical text of the epics, regarded Homer as the universal educator of Greece even when the age of kings was long gone, their politics were democratic, chivalry was a distant memory, and the gods were no longer seen among humans.

A good proportion of the epics is composed of building blocks, the memory stock of oral poets.

I shall write of the epics as of a finite number of words telling of an indefinitely large world.

As always, the delight is in the details: Both beginnings are precisely fitting keys to their epics, as they are carefully keyed to each other.

The epics, on the other hand, simply end when the poet judges they should, and if nothing is concluded, yet something is perfected.

In composing his epics, Homer drew upon a vast number of poems and songs that had been transmitted orally for generations.

In the market place, people still read out poems and spoke epics from memory.

First and foremost, he was a lyric poet, but he composed epics and dramas as well.