40 articles
Pharsalia
The Pharsalia, also known as the Bellum Civile (Civil War), is a ten-book Latin epic by the Roman poet Lucan recounting the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey.
Posthomerica
The Posthomerica, Greek τὰ μεθ' Ὅμηρον, is a fourteen-book Greek epic by Quintus of Smyrna covering the Trojan War from Hector's death to the Greeks' departure.
Shield of Heracles
The Shield of Heracles (Greek: Aspis Hērakleous) is an archaic Greek epic poem of 480 hexameter lines, attributed to Hesiod in antiquity, recounting Heracles' killing of Cycnus and describing his shield, forged by Hephaestus.
Silver Latin epic
Silver Latin epic is the Latin epic poetry written after Augustus' death in AD 14, principally by Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, and Statius in the first century AD.
The Odyssey (Emily Wilson translation)
Emily Wilson's 2017 W. W. Norton translation of Homer's Odyssey (Ὀδύσσεια), the first published English version by a woman, in iambic pentameter with the same line count, rendering polytropos as 'complicated'.
Thebaid
The Thebaid (Thēbaïs) is a Latin epic in twelve books by the Roman poet Statius, first published in 91 or 92 CE, retelling the war of the Seven against Thebes.
Theban Cycle
The Theban Cycle is a modern grouping of four lost ancient Greek epic poems on Theban myths: the Oedipodea, Thebaid, Epigoni, and Alcmeonis, named in the 1800s.
Translations of the Odyssey
Translations of the Odyssey: complete English renderings of Homer's Greek epic, from Chapman (1614) and Pope (1725) through Rieu, Fitzgerald, Lattimore (1965), Fagles (1996), Wilson (2017, first by a woman), and Mendelsohn (2025), differing in meter, fidelity, and diction.
Trojan Horse
Trojan Horse (Δούρηος Ἵππος, Wooden Horse of Troy): the stratagem by which Odysseus's Greeks hid warriors in a huge wooden horse built by Epeius, entered Troy, and sacked it; sources, art, and modern metaphor.
Virgilian epic
Virgilian epic is the tradition of Latin narrative epic founded on Virgil's Aeneid, embracing later ancient and post-classical epics measured against that poem through imitation, inversion, or revision.