Many early civilizations produced large-scale works of literature, often in verse, that embodied their own view of themselves. These epic poems usually focus on the adventures of one or more warrior-heroes, and are often intermingled with the myths and religions of the peoples who created them. For example, the Hindu epic of the Ramayana , composed in the 1st millennium BCE , tells of the lives, loves and battles of Rama, an avatar of the great god Vishnu.

The earliest epics were at first transmitted orally. The Iliad , attributed to Homer and first written down in the 8th century BCE , belongs to a long tradition of Greek oral poetry about a war between Greeks and Trojans that may have taken place several hundred years earlier. Similarly, the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh , written down in the 7th century BCE , recorded older tales that had been passed down, including the story of a great flood that also appears in the Jewish Bible and other myths and legends of the Near East. The earliest manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf dates from the late 10th century CE , but the poem itself was probably composed some 300 years earlier, and tells a story mixing fiction and some historical fact, set in 5th-century Scandinavia and northern Germany, from where the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons had migrated to England.

Epics are often about the origins of the people who created them, and their heroes and villains embody qualities regarded as desirable. The Iliad was the product of a warlike society and its hero Achilles has been described as little more than a highly effective killing machine. The eponymous hero of Beowulf , in contrast, although also a warrior and technically a pagan in the period in which the poem is set, is a much more nuanced character, and is given a range of Christian virtues to suit the values of the poem’s audience.

The Hindu god Rama, hero of the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana, stalks the demon Marica, who has assumed the form of a golden deer

Although early epics began in oral tradition and extended their cultural significance step by step, some later epics were created by their authors as self-consciously literary celebrations of a nation or culture. The outstanding early example is the Aeneid , by the Roman poet Virgil, effectively the official poet of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Virgil builds on the stories of the Iliad , taking the Trojan prince Aeneas as his hero. Aeneas escapes from Troy as the Greeks burn it to the ground, and after many journeys and battles becomes the ancestor of the Romans. By tracing an ancestry back to an age when gods and heroes walked the Earth, Virgil endows both Rome and Augustus with legitimacy and dignity.

EPICS