The World's Great Epics: A Reading List
In brief: a tradition-by-tradition tour of the great epics in the Poetry Codex, each with a reason to read it, the translation we recommend, and a link to its study guide.
How to use this list
An epic is a long narrative poem about deeds that matter to a whole people: wars, voyages, foundings, journeys to the underworld. Every culture that has epics has used them to ask what a hero is and what a community owes its dead.
The Poetry Codex holds the great epics in classic public-domain translations, and our editors have written a study guide for each, with a summary, characters, themes, key passages and questions. Below, each entry links to the guide and to the translation we recommend. Most texts have other translations too, listed on the guide.
A word on our choices. Where we recommend a prose translation, it is because accuracy matters most for a first reading; where we recommend verse, it is because the translation is a fine English poem as well as a faithful one. For the English poems at the end, no translation is needed: read them as their authors wrote them, ideally aloud.
You do not need to read in order. Start with whatever calls to you.
Mesopotamia
The Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest long heroic poem to survive. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, loses his friend Enkidu and goes to the edge of the world in search of everlasting life. It is short, strange and deeply moving about friendship and death. Read R. Campbell Thompson's verse rendering (1928).
Greece and Rome
The Iliad. Homer's poem of the wrath of Achilles in the tenth year at Troy: the foundation of Western literature and still its most searching poem about war. Read A. T. Murray's Loeb prose (1924); our companion article, "Which Translation of the Iliad Should You Read?", compares all ten versions we hold.
The Odyssey. The poem of return: Odysseus' ten-year journey home, and his wife Penelope's long wait. Monsters, disguises and a great homecoming. Read Murray's Loeb prose (1919).
Theogony. Not a heroic epic but its close cousin: Hesiod's hexameter poem, probably of around 700 BC, on the birth of the gods and Zeus' rise to power. It is the best map of the Greek gods behind every other poem here. Read Hugh G. Evelyn-White's Loeb prose (1914).
The Argonautica. Apollonius of Rhodes retold Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece in third-century BC Alexandria. Its portrait of Medea in love shaped Virgil's Dido. Read Arthur S. Way's rhymed verse (1901).
The Aeneid. Virgil's epic of the Trojan exile who founds the Roman people, and of everything his mission costs him and others. The model for nearly every later European epic. Read J. W. Mackail's prose (1885).
Metamorphoses. Ovid's fifteen books of some 250 myths of transformation, witty, cruel and beautiful, the source book of Western art. Read Brookes More's blank verse (1922).
The Pharsalia. Lucan's furious, unfinished epic of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, written under Nero: an anti-Aeneid without gods. Read J. D. Duff's Loeb prose (1928).
India and Persia
The Ramayana. Valmiki's story of Rama's exile, the abduction of Sita and the war in Lanka, which Indian tradition calls the first artful poem. Read Romesh Chunder Dutt's condensed verse (1899).
The Mahabharata. The vast epic of the war between the Kauravas and Pandavas, traditionally ascribed to Vyasa, and one of the longest poems ever composed. Begin with Dutt's condensed verse (1899); go on to Ganguli's complete prose, and to the Bhagavad Gita, the dialogue on duty set on its battlefield.
The Shahnameh. Ferdowsi's Book of Kings, finished in 1010, tells the history of Iran from the first kings to the Arab conquest. Its tragedy of Rustam and his son Suhrab is among the great stories of the world. Read the Warners' complete blank verse (1905–1925).
The Turkic world
Köroğlu. The bandit-minstrel hero of the Turkic oral destan, who rides his horse Kırat from the mountain stronghold of Çamlıbel to defy pashas and khans, singing as he fights. The tale alternates prose with sung verse. Read Alexander Chodzko's Adventures of Kurroglou (1842), taken down in northern Persia in the 1830s.
Medieval and Northern Europe
Beowulf. The great Old English poem of a hero who fights Grendel, Grendel's mother and, in old age, a dragon: heroic and elegiac at once. Read Francis Barton Gummere's alliterative verse (1910).
The Poetic Edda. The Old Norse lays of the gods and the Völsung heroes, from the creation of the world to Ragnarök. Read Henry Adams Bellows's verse (1923).
The Táin. The central epic of the Ulster cycle: Queen Maev's raid for the Brown Bull of Cooley, held off by the boy-hero Cú Chulainn. Read Mary A. Hutton's blank verse (1907).
The Song of Roland. The oldest and finest Old French chanson de geste: Roland's last stand at Roncevaux and the horn he sounds too late. Read C. K. Scott Moncrieff's verse (1919).
The Poem of the Cid. The Castilian epic of an exiled warrior who wins back his honour. Unusually realistic, and full of family feeling. Read Rose and Bacon's rhymed verse (1919).
The Nibelungenlied. Siegfried's murder and Kriemhild's terrible revenge on the Burgundians, composed around 1200 on the Danube. Read George Henry Needler's verse (1904).
The Lay of Igor's Campaign. The only surviving epic of Kievan Rus': Prince Igor's failed raid of 1185 and his wife Yaroslavna's lament. Short and haunting. Read Leonard A. Magnus's prose (1915).
The Divine Comedy. Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in a hundred cantos, the summit of medieval poetry. Read Longfellow's line-by-line translation (1867).
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A Christmas beheading game and a test of a knight's honesty: the most elegant romance in Middle English. Read Jessie L. Weston's verse (1912).
The Kalevala. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century from far older Finnish and Karelian songs: the sage Väinämöinen, the magic Sampo and the doomed Kullervo. Read W. F. Kirby's version in the original metre (1907).
The Renaissance
Orlando Furioso. Ariosto's romance epic of knights, enchantresses and Orlando's love-madness, the most entertaining poem on this list. Read William Stewart Rose's stanzas (1823–1831).
Jerusalem Delivered. Tasso's epic of the First Crusade, torn between heroic duty and the enchanted gardens of romance. Read Edward Fairfax's ottava rima (1600), a classic of Elizabethan verse.
The Lusiads. Camões's epic of Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, celebrating a nation rather than a single hero. Read Sir Richard Burton's ottava rima (1880).
The Faerie Queene. Spenser's allegorical romance epic of knights who embody the virtues, written for Elizabeth I. Read the original text, one Book at a time.
English long poems
Paradise Lost. Milton's epic of the Fall, with a Satan who has fascinated readers ever since: the greatest long poem in English. Read the original text, aloud if you can.
The Prelude. Wordsworth turned epic inward, making the growth of his own mind the subject of a long blank-verse poem. Read the 1850 text.
Don Juan. Byron's comic, digressive epic, which mocks the very idea of epic while being one. Read the text for its narrator above all.
Aurora Leigh. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel in verse about a woman poet's growth, a modern epic on art, love and work. Read the text.
Where to begin
If you want one route through all this, try three poems: the Iliad, the Aeneid and Paradise Lost. Together they show how epic was invented, remade and turned into Christian argument. Then step outside Europe with Gilgamesh, the Shahnameh or Köroğlu, and you will see that the questions are shared across the world: what is glory worth, and what do we owe to the dead?