Virgil in India: Epic, History, and Military Tactics in the Lusiads

Camões begins the Lusiads, his great epic on Vasco da Gama’s journey to India, by brushing aside both classical models of epic and the tradition of Italian romance. Forget, he says, “the journeys of the subtle Greek and the Trojan”—that is, Odysseus and Aeneas—and let’s hear no more of Alexander or Trajan. Here we have a new experience, the experience of the Portuguese, whose deeds outshine those of the ancients, offering a greater valor, “outro valor mais alto.” As for the Rodomonte, Ruggiero, and Orlando, the heroes of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, they are mere fantasies. Now we have a true history that will outshine the inventions of the writers of romance. Indeed, Vasco da Gama has outpaced the classical heroes, snatching fame from Aeneas himself—“de Enneais toma a fama.”¹ Camões’s poem is thus an account of a new kind of action—modern heroism—and a new kind of epic, based in history.

These gestures of literary modernism are familiar to readers of Renaissance epic, a genre that is as much about struggles over literary heritage as it is about war or conquest. However, it is striking that Camões both relegates Virgil’s Aeneid to oblivion and then recalls it in his praise of da Gama. Virgil’s poem would seem to be the epic model most generative of Camões’s own. The structure of the Aeneid, divided as it is between six books of wandering about the Mediterranean and six books of war over Italy, offers the prototype for the structure of the Lusiads, divided between six books of wandering about the coast of Africa and four books of… well, dithering and negotiating in India. Indeed, one of the formal and rhetorical difficulties faced by Camões’s poem is precisely that, in contrast to the noble models it evokes at the outset, it offers no great feats of heroism, no unforgettable battles and no superhuman instances of individual courage. The poem is, in effect, about a trading mission or diplomatic sally from the Portuguese to India. The project of the journey—to travel to a land never before reached by sea—was indeed daring. However the poem’s claim to overgo literary predecessors encounters both formal and rhetorical difficulties when we realize that Os Lusíadas fails to generate a dramatic military enterprise commensurate with the overblown rhetoric about Portuguese daring that Camões deploys throughout. What then, does it do?²

At one level, the failure of the Lusiads to be “heroic” in any traditional epic sense of the word may be traced to its own historical moment. Da Gama sails in 1497, and the poem dates from 1572. Thus it raises the problem of what it would mean to write heroic epic in an age when merchants, scholars, and spies have replaced knights and heroes as the agents of history. In this context it is entirely fitting that Camões should turn to Aeneas, himself the least martial of epic heroes, as the prototype for da Gama. In what follows I consider Camões’s undertaking of constructing epic action in the age of Galileo and Walsingham. I want to explore both Da Gama’s changing status as an epic, or post-epic, hero, and Camões’s status as a new Virgil. I will pursue this through a reading of the passages in the poem in which we seem most clearly to be in a post-epic world. That is, after the travelling and the encounters with monsters and unfriendly natives are behind us, and we are safely in India, trying to negotiate with the Samorim of Calicut. What kinds of values does such activity illustrate? And how does Camões’s literary dialogue with Virgil work to impose the new poetics he signals at the outset?

There had, of course, been negotiating in Virgil. In Canto VII of the Aeneid Aeneas and his men land in Italy, and he sends a diplomatic mission, headed by Ilioneus, to speak with King Latinus. We get a description of Latinus...