Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil With a Chapter on the Gilgamesh Poems

Charles Rowan Beye’s critically acclaimed interpretive introduction to the epic poetry and poets of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Assyria is here reprinted in an expanded second edition with a new preface, new chapter on Gilgamesh, and an Appendix of Further Reading 1993–2005.

For centuries the beginnings of the literary history of the West were defined by the Hebrew Bible—what most people call the Old Testament—and Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey. These texts were once naively imagined to have come about in splendid isolation either as a miracle of divine creation or the spontaneous combustion of the “Greek genius”. The mighty stream of words down over the millennia to our own time are so many generations of offspring still somehow beholden to their initial begetters. Thus do we construe Western Literature.

— from Chapter 8: Gilgamesh

Special Features

1. Oral Poetry
2. The Poet’s World
3. Poetic Technique
4. The Iliad
5. The Odyssey
6. The Argonautica
7. The Aeneid Further Reading
8. Gilgamesh Further Reading 1993–2005