![]() ![]() ![]() The first epics were products of preliterate societies and oral history poetic traditions. įamous examples of epic poetry include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Indian Mahabharata and Rāmāyaṇa, the Tamil Silappatikaram, the Persian Shahnameh, the Ancient Greek Odyssey and Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, the Old English Beowulf, Dante's Divine Comedy, the Finnish Kalevala, the German Nibelungenlied, the French Song of Roland, the Spanish Cantar de mio Cid, the Portuguese Os Lusíadas, the Armenian Daredevils of Sassoun, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz. The longest epic written is the ancient Indian Mahabharata, which consists of 100,000 ślokas or over 200,000 verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), as well as long prose passages, so that at ~1.8 million words it is roughly four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa, and roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. ![]() Although recognized as a historical figure, Gilgamesh, as represented in the epic, is a largely legendary or mythical figure. The poem details the exploits of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk. 2500–1300 BCE), which was recorded in ancient Sumer during the Neo-Sumerian Empire. The oldest epic recognized is the Epic of Gilgamesh ( c. Hence aside from writers like Dante, Camões, and Milton, Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica and Virgil in Aeneid adopted and adapted Homer's style and subject matter, but used devices available only to those who write, and in their works Nonnus' Dionysiaca and Tulsidas' Sri Ramacharit Manas also used stylistic elements typical of epics. Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes by which they could memorize the epic as received in tradition and add to the epic in their performances. The English word epic comes from the Latin epicus, which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective ἐπικός ( epikos), from ἔπος ( epos), "word, story, poem." Overview ![]()
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