EPIC POETRY or EPOS, the names given to the most dig nified and elaborate forms of narrative poetry. The word epopee is used. When we first discover the epos in Greek literature, 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 with a didactic or religious purpose. The early epic poets, Lesches, Linus, Orpheus, Arctinus, Eugam mon, are the veriest shadows, whose names often betray their symbolic and fabulous character. The Iliad and the Odyssey (see HOMER) 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 revi sions of the mythical history of the country, but were accom panied by innumerable poems of a similar character. 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 Herac leia, of which fragments remain. Other epic writers, who appear to be 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 school of philosophi cal epic, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles being the leaders.
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 B.C., in 18 books, an historical epic of the Annales, dealing with the whole chronicle of Rome. Virgil began the most famous of Roman epics in the year 3o B.C., and when he died, nine years later, he desired that the ms. of the Aeneid should be burned, as it required three years' work to complete it. In the next generation, the Pharsalia of Lucan, of which Cato, as the type of the republican spirit, is the hero, was the principal example of Latin epic. Statius, under the Flavian emperors, wrote several epic poems, of which the Thebaid sur vives. In the ist century A.D. Valerius Flaccus wrote the Argo nautica in eight books, and Silius Italicus the Punic War, in 17 books; these authors show a great decline in taste and merit. At the close of the 4th century the style revived with Claudian, who wrote the Rape of Proserpine. With Claudian the history of epic poetry among the ancients closes.
In mediaeval times there existed a large body of narrative poetry to which the general title of Epic has usually been given. Three principal schools are recognized, the French, the Teutonic and the Icelandic. Teutonic rpic poetry deals, as a rule, with legends founded on the history of Germany in the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, and in particular with such heroes as Ermanaric, Attila and Theodoric. But there is also an important group in it which deals with English themes, and among these Beowulf, Waldere, The Lay of Maldon and Finnesburh are pre-eminent. To this group is allied the purely German poem of Hildebrand, attributed to c. Boo. Among these Beowulf is the only one which exists in anything like complete form, and it is of all examples of Teutonic epic the most important. It is written, like all old Teutonic work of the kind, in alliterative unrhymed rhythm.
The surviving epical fragments of Icelandic composition are found thrown together in the Codex Regius, under the title of The Elder Edda (see EDDA), a most precious ms. discovered in the i 7th century. The French mediaeval epics (see CHANSONS DE GESTE) are late in comparison with those of England, Ger many and Iceland. They form a curious transitional link between primitive and modern poetry; the literature of civilized Europe may be said to begin with them. The existing masterpiece of this kind is the magnificent Roland. Of the progress and decline of the chansons de geste a fuller account is given elsewhere. To the Nibelungenlied (q.v.) also, detailed attention is given in a separate article.
What may be called the artificial or secondary epics of modern Europe, founded upon an imitation of the Iliad and the Aeneid, are more numerous than the ordinary reader supposes, although but few of them have preserved much vitality. In Italy the Chanson de Roland inspired romantic epics by Luigi Pulci (1432 87), whose Morgante Maggiore appeared in 1481, and is a mas terpiece of burlesque; by M. M. Boiardo (1434-94), whose Or lando Innamorato was finished in 1486; by Francesco Bello whose Mambriano was published in 1497; by Lo dovico Ariosto (q.v.), whose Orlando Furioso, by far the greatest of its class, was published in 1516, and by Luigi Dolce (1508-68), as well as by a great number of less illustrious poets. The most splendid of all the epics of Italy, however, was, and remains, the Jerusalem Delivered of Torquato Tasso (q.v.). Early Portuguese literature is rich in epic poems; but all others are obscured by the glory of Camoens (q.v.), whose magnificent Lusiads had been printed in 1572, and forms the summit of Portuguese literature. In Spanish poetry, the Poem of the Cid takes the first place, as the great national epic of the middle ages; it is supposed to have been written between 1135 and 1175. Perhaps the finest modern epic in Spanish verse, is the Araucana (1569-9o) of Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga , "the first literary work of merit," as Fitzmaurice-Kelly remarks, "composed in either American con tinent." In France, the epic never flourished in modern times, and no real success attended even the Henriade of Voltaire. In English literature The Faery Queen of Spenser has the same claim as the Italian poems mentioned above to bear the name of epic, and Milton, who stands entirely apart, may be said, by his isolated Paradise Lost, to take rank with Homer and Virgil.
See Bossu, Traite du poeme epique (1675) ; Voltaire, Sur la poesie epique; Fauviel, L'Origine de l'epopee chevaleresque (1832) ; Leon Gautier, Les Epopees francaises (1865-68) ; W. von Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur (1879) ; Gaston Paris, La Litterature francaise au ntoyen age (189o) ; W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (1897), and Essays in Mediaeval Literature (1go5) ; F. B. Gummere, The Old est English Epic (1922) ; Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic (3rd ed. 1924).