EPIC POETRY

epic poetry, or epos (from the gr. [greek: epos], a story, and [greek: epikos], pertaining to a story), the names given to the most dignified and elaborate forms of narrative poetry. the word _epopee_ is also, but more rarely, employed to designate the same thing, [greek: epopoios] in greek being a maker of epic poetry, and [greek: epopoiia] what he makes. it is to greece, where the earliest literary monuments which we possess are of an epical character, that we turn for a definition of these vast heroic compositions, and we gather that their subject-matter was not confined, as voltaire and the critics of the 18th century supposed, to "narratives in verse of warlike adventures." when we first discover the epos, hexameter verse has already been selected for its vehicle. in this form epic poems were composed not merely dealing with war and personal romance, but carrying out a didactic purpose, or celebrating the mysteries of religion. these three divisions, to which are severally attached the more or less mythical names of homer, hesiod and orpheus seem to have marked the earliest literary movement of the greeks. but, even here, we must be warned that what we possess is not primitive; there had been unwritten epics, probably in hexameters, long before the composition of any now-surviving fragment. the saga of the greek nation, the catalogue of its arts and possessions, the rites and beliefs of its priesthood, must have been circulated, by word of mouth, long before any historical poet was born. we look upon homer and hesiod as records of primitive thought, but professor gilbert murray reminds us that "our _iliad, odyssey_, _erga_ and _theogony_ are not the first, nor the second, nor the twelfth of such embodiments." the early epic poets, lesches, linus, orpheus, arctinus, eugammon are the veriest shadows, whose names often betray their symbolic and fabulous character. it is now believed that there was a class of minstrels, the rhapsodists or homeridae, whose business it was to recite poetry at feasts and other solemn occasions. "the real bards of early greece were all nameless and impersonal." when our tradition begins to be preserved, we find everything of a saga-character attributed to homer, a blind man and an inhabitant of chios. this gradually crystallized until we find aristotle definitely treating homer as a person, and attributing to him the composition of three great poems, the _iliad_, the _odyssey_ and the _margites_, now lost (see homer). the first two of these have been preserved and form for us the type of the ancient epic; when we speak of epic poetry, we unconsciously measure it by the example of the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_. it is quite certain, however, that these poems had not merely been preceded by a vast number of revisions of the mythical history of the country, but were accompanied by innumerable poems of a similar character, now entirely lost. that antiquity did not regard these other epics as equal in beauty to the _iliad_ seems to be certain; but such poems as _cypria_, _iliou persis_ (sack of ilion) and _aethiopis_ can hardly but have exhibited other sides of the epic tradition. did we possess them, it is almost certain that we could speak with more assurance as to the scope of epic poetry in the days of oral tradition, and could understand more clearly what sort of ballads in hexameter it was which rhapsodes took round from court to court. in the 4th century b.c. it seems that people began to write down what was not yet forgotten of all this oral poetry. unfortunately, the earliest critic who describes this process is proclus, a byzantine neo-platonist, who did not write until some 800 years later, when the whole tradition had become hopelessly corrupted. when we pass from homer and hesiod, about whose actual existence critics will be eternally divided, we reach in the 7th century a poet, peisander of rhodes, who wrote an epic poem, the _heracleia_, of which fragments remain. other epic writers, who appear to be undoubtedly historic, are antimachus of colophon, who wrote a _thebais_; panyasis, who, like peisander, celebrated the feats of heracles; choerilus of samos; and anyte, of whom we only know that she was an epic poetess, and was called "the female homer." in the 6th and 5th centuries b.c. there was a distinct school of philosophical epic, and we distinguish the names of xenophanes, parmenides and empedocles as the leaders of it. from the dawn of latin literature epic poetry seems to have been cultivated in italy. a greek exile, named livius andronicus, translated the _odyssey_ into latin during the first punic war, but the earliest original epic of rome was the lost _bellum punicum_ of naevius, a work to which virgil was indebted. a little later, ennius composed, about 172