What Would Augustine Make of This?
Jacques Barzun favorably mentions Camoens's Lusiads in his fascinating cultural history From Dawn to Decadence. Published in 1572, The Lusiads is the epic poem of Portugal (as The Aeneid is the epic poem of Rome and The Iliad and The Odyssey are the epic poems of ancient Greece). I picked up a prose translation at Tim's Used Books in Provincetown.
I've gotten to the second of ten cantos, and two things strike me about the poem thus far. The first is best illustrated here, with Vasco da Gama speaking as a devout Christian after overcoming the strategems of various Moslem adversaries:
"Seeing, then, that neither human wisdom nor forethought can avail against such feignings and deceits, I beseech thee God, to take under thy protection one who, failing thee, must abandon hope. And if pity for this wretched, errant band has so moved thee that, out of thy divine goodness alone, thou hast saved us from the malign and treacherous foe, lead us now, I pray thee, to some haven that is genuinely safe, or reveal to us the land we seek, since it is in thy service alone we sail."
This pious prayer was heard by Venus, and moved her deeply. Taking leave of the nymphs, who grieved to see her go so soon, she soared again to the starry regions. Her own third heaven welcomed her back, but she did not stop there, but pressed on to the sixth, the seat of Jupiter himself, where she arrived all flushed with the journey, her face radiating such dazzling beauty that the sky and stars above, the air around and all who beheld her were smitten with love of her. From her eyes, where Cupid makes his abode, there flashed a generous warmth that set the icy poles on fire and confused the frigid with the tropic zone.
The prayers of a devout Christian to the one true God are heard and acted upon by Venus, Jupiter, and the panoply of Roman gods? This is stranger even than Dante's elevation of a common Florentine woman on whom he had a crush to all but the highest level of the Catholic hierarchy.
The second thing that strikes me about the poem is how simply black and white it is for an epic. Homer's poems, and particularly Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, portray the adversaries (in Homer's case, the Trojans and in Ariosto's case, the Saracens and Muslims) as richly human and morally equivalent to (if a bit less destined than) the heroes. In The Lusiads, the Moslems are painted as simple, deceitful, and stupid, which makes the poem less interesting (particularly in this moment of high anti-Islamic prejudice).
8:40:18 AM 
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