Antiquity

Poetry in Europe begins as sung narrative. The Iliad and Odyssey were composed for performance in dactylic hexameter, a line built on long and short syllables, out of a stock of phrases a singer could work in as he went. When they were first written down is one of the longest-running arguments in classical scholarship: the Greek alphabet was in use by about 800 BC, and the proposed dates for a written text run from close to composition in the eighth century to a text fixed at Athens in the sixth, some two hundred years later, and some scholars would not call the text settled before the Alexandrian editors of the second century BC. Everything the later tradition takes for granted comes from them: the invocation of a muse, the epic simile, the catalogue, the journey to the dead, the hero's homecoming.

Rome learned its verse from Greece. Virgil turned the hexameter into the national poem of empire; Ovid used it for fifteen books of transformations that became the sourcebook of European myth; Lucretius used it to argue that the world is made of atoms and that death is nothing to fear. India's Mahabharata grew over the same centuries into one of the longest poems in the world. None of these was in English: what you read here are the verse translations that English poets made of them, and those translations carry the metres of their own centuries.