With India as their goal - with the further objective of setting up a lucrative trade route for King Manuel I - the Portuguese must contend with inhospitable peoples, the rigors of a long sea voyage, and interference from Bacchus and other hostile gods. And it’s these people and their admirale exploits that Camões tells of - though not before first calling upon “the nymphs of the Tagus” (1.4) to assist him in his poetic enterprise.Ĭomposed of 10 cantos, the narrative of The Lusiads revolves around the “Portuguese Argonauts” (1.18), led by da Gama, who bravely and courageously - and in Camoes’ mind - achieve the feat of traversing “oceans where none had ventured” (1.1). Camões finds in his Portuguese heroes something more substantial, more real, and more worthy of poetic praise than those which are the subject of many an epic. There many remarks of this nature, not just da Gama and Aeneas comparisons, but, more broadly, the Portuguese contrasted with the illustrious Greek and Romans of the past, with the former presented as superior. Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer who reached India in 1498, and who is the protagonist of Camões’s poem, is compared favorably to Virgil’s heroic Trojan: the former has “snatched renown from wandering Aeneas” (1.12). (Also like Virgil’s Aeneid, there are notes of melancholy, nostalgia, and apprehension sprinkled throughout Camões’s epic.)Īs for the heroic Portuguese who populate the pages of The Lusiads, Camões sets them against, and quickly elevates them above, the famed figures found in the stories of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and others. Camões captured for Portugal - as Virgil did for Italy - a story that tells of a virtuous people, grand ambitions, and a series of events with world-changing implications. The rather tempestuous author - who spent time in jail, was involved in more than a few kerfuffles, lost an eye in battle, traveled widely, and died in a state of penury - wrote his Renaissance epic with a long tradition behind him.

Published in 1572, Os Lusíadas ( The Lusiads) was written by one of the most important figures in Portuguese literary history: Luís de Camões (1524-1580).

The Lusiads by Luís de Camões