Before most people could read, they listened, sometimes to a singer for nights at a time. An epic is a long narrative poem about heroic deeds that matter to a whole people. Epics tell where a community came from, what it honors and what it fears, and most early ones began as oral poetry long before anyone wrote them down.
Gilgamesh
The story of Gilgamesh comes from ancient Mesopotamia. Short Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, a king of the city of Uruk, survive from around 2100 BCE. Later Babylonian poets wove them into a single epic, and the best known version, written on eleven clay tablets with a twelfth added, is traditionally credited to a scholar named Sin-leqi-unninni, working sometime late in the second millennium BCE. Gilgamesh is often called the oldest surviving great work of literature.
Gilgamesh begins as a tyrant. The gods create a wild man, Enkidu, to be his match; the two fight, become friends and kill the forest monster Humbaba. When the gods condemn Enkidu to die, Gilgamesh is shattered and terrified for himself. He travels to the edge of the world to find Utnapishtim, the one man granted eternal life after surviving a great flood. Gilgamesh fails a test of staying awake, wins a plant that restores youth and loses it to a snake while he bathes. He returns home to the walls of Uruk. When George Smith of the British Museum read the flood tablet in 1872, the news caused a sensation because it closely parallels Noah's flood in Genesis. The central theme of Gilgamesh is the human confrontation with death, and its answer is modest: no one escapes dying, but people can build, love and be remembered.
Homer
The Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to a poet the Greeks called Homer, were probably composed in the eighth or seventh century BCE. The Iliad, about 15,700 lines, covers a few weeks in the tenth year of the Trojan War and centers on the rage of Achilles. The Odyssey follows Odysseus on his ten year struggle to reach home and family on the island of Ithaca.
How could anyone compose such poems without writing? In the 1930s the American scholar Milman Parry, and later his student Albert Lord, studied singers in Yugoslavia who composed long poems in performance without writing, and argued that Homer came out of a similar tradition. Such singers rely on ready-made phrases that fit the meter. Stock phrases such as "swift-footed Achilles" and "rosy-fingered Dawn" are epithets, and they helped oral poets compose as they sang. The Iliad's moral peak comes near its end, when old King Priam crosses enemy lines at night to kneel before Achilles, who killed his son Hector, and kisses his hands to beg for the body. Achilles weeps, thinking of his own father, and the two enemies grieve together.
The Mahabharata
From ancient India comes the Mahabharata, perhaps the longest poem ever composed, with about 100,000 couplets in its longer versions. Tradition credits the sage Vyasa, but the poem grew over centuries, very roughly between 400 BCE and 400 CE. It tells of a war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, ending in a catastrophic battle at Kurukshetra. Inside it sits the Bhagavad Gita, in which the warrior Arjuna, seeing his relatives and teachers in the enemy ranks, refuses to fight, and his charioteer Krishna, revealed as divine, answers him. A central concern of the Mahabharata is dharma: duty, right conduct and the moral order. The poem is famous for refusing easy answers. Its heroes cheat, its villains have reasons, and victory feels like grief. Its companion, the Ramayana, attributed to the poet Valmiki, follows Prince Rama's exile and his rescue of his wife Sita.
Epic beyond the classics
Epic is neither only ancient nor only written. Around the year 1010 the Persian poet Ferdowsi completed the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, a vast poem on Iran's legendary and historical past. The Epic of Sundiata, about the thirteenth century founder of the Mali Empire, has been handed down for centuries by griots, West African performers who preserve history, genealogy and story through oral performance. Many epics share features such as journeys, divine meddling and long lists of warriors, and many open in medias res, Latin for starting a story in the middle of the action, as the Iliad does in the war's tenth year.
Critics note that epics often celebrate war and aristocratic warriors, and that women in them are frequently prizes to be won. Defenders answer that the greatest epics are the ones that see most clearly what war costs.
Worked example: two heroes and a dead friend
Set Gilgamesh beside the Iliad. Both turn on the death of a beloved friend: Enkidu for Gilgamesh, Patroclus for Achilles. Both heroes react with excess. Gilgamesh refuses to let Enkidu be buried until, the poem says, a worm falls from the corpse's nose; Achilles drags Hector's body behind his chariot. In both, grief forces the hero to face his own mortality. Gilgamesh ends by looking at city walls, the things people build that outlast them. The Iliad ends with an enemy's hands in Achilles' hands and a shared meal, recognition that the killer and the father of the killed are both human beings who will die. Both arrive at the same quiet discovery: the hero shares the common fate, and that shared fate is the ground of mercy.