The classical age

Beginnings

pp. 12-48

in: Adeline Johns-Putra, The history of the epic, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

By predicating the epic on the notion of influence and inter-textual dynamics, we can trace the genre along a retrospect of influence to the eighth century BC — that is, to the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. Even then, it must be borne in mind that these Greek epics, which we attribute to Homer, were not composed in a vacuum. They were the result of an oral tradition of narratives telling of the creation of the world and of significant events in early human history. They are comparable — indeed, intimately related — to a body of stories circulating in the neighbouring Near East, among them a narrative often thought of as the earliest recorded epic: the epic of Gilgamesh. We begin our history of the epic, then, with Gilgamesh, before addressing Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Homeric influence would of course extend well beyond later classical Greek literature and thought into the age of the Roman Empire, when Homer's monumental achievements inspire, primarily, Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil's conscious and often meticulous imitation of Homer is the generic genuflection that establishes the epic as a living genre in the first place. Further innovation follows, and would comprise works such as Lucan's Bellum Civile and Ovid's Metamorphoses.