In my anthropology course, Verbal Art and Performance, we recently talked about Milman Parry’s theory of oral composition. According to Parry, the literary genre is an insufficient channel for epic poems because epics were strictly oral performances designed for an audience in ancient times. The notion of “literature,” in fact, did not even exist at the time when the classical epic flourished. The Lusiads, however, seems to contradict Parry’s theory. Given that it was written in the renaissance, when the literary genre was well established, The Lusiads can take recognizably epic conventions and work them into literature without making them feel awkward or clichéd because it is composed with a reader rather than an audience in mind. A literary text like The Lusiads also has a wider reach and a longer lifespan than oral text which  impacts the style of communication. Despite these differences in intended audience and communication style, however, I still view The Lusiads as successful epic because it has the same intentions as a classical oral epic and successfully achieves its goals of preserving and promoting the greatness of a culture.