To start off with, the only other epic, at least classically, I think I’ve read is Beowulf. So my conception of an epic poem is something where a hero goes out and experiences a, well, “epic” journey filled with monsters and other hardships. The Lusiads was much different for me to read.

While I was reading, I was at first struck by in the first couple of Cantos how un-heroic (by Beowulf standards) de Gama was. The only reason he got out of the sticky situations set for him by Bacchus and the Muslims was because of Venus coming in to save the day for him. This was incredibly interesting for me because this overarching line of narrative throughout the story follows the same cyclical epic narrative structure where we see the hero is in some sort of grave danger before a “battle” of some sort ensues and the hero is saved and goes back home, but our hero-character isn’t the one who is doing all the fixing, only the gods.

But then I made it to Canto three through most of five where the narration changed to de Gama’s first person account of first Portugal’s history then of his own journey thus far. This telling made the story seem, to me, at this point more of a self-promotional tale than this epic journey of the gods. Don’t get me wrong, I thought this was interesting and enjoyable, but de Gama’s words made the narration of the epic more personable in the way that we see how the human actors interacted in each situation rather than the event/Bacchus plot/Venus counter-plot pattern we had seen thus far in the book.

So with this switching of narration among other instances, such as de Gama’s crew enjoying downtime by telling stories of the English, makes the story a lot more vibrant and nuanced than from what I can remember from other epics being, like Beowulf. What I mean by this is that in the over-aching third person story arch in the Lusiads, we see both a general epic narrative circle encompassing the whole story, but we also see a smaller version of this circle within each plot and counter-plot by the gods. And then with the internal stories that the characters recount to each other within the book, we also see the same pattern of “normalcy” to strife and back to “normalcy” with a few variations as the traditional epic narrative structure.

From what I remember of Beowulf, this narrative structure repeats itself two or three times with the different parts of the epic, but in the Lusiads the structure not only repeats itself but changes and is varied based upon which narrator is speaking and about which character the narrator is talking about. This makes the Lusiads incredibly interesting narratively to me, but also interesting when thinking of a story as a map or diagram. In my mind I see this story as a kind of web of interconnected circles where each narrative plays off of the others either thematically or in terms of who the characters were in the sub-stories. It makes me think of the Renaissance way of doing latitude/longitude lines where they were all based off of one centralized location or star (where in this case Venus was constantly referred to as a shining star of beauty). In all, then, the Lusiads both made and remade the traditional structure of an epic that makes it an interesting read.