The Story Archive

The Lusiads

Luís de Camões · 1572 CE · Poem · Portuguese · Renaissance

Four ships stand out of the Tagus to find a sea road to India, and Olympus divides over whether they should ever arrive, Venus working for them and Bacchus against, while the whole Portuguese past is recited to a king on the Swahili coast along the way. Off the southern cape a giant made of cloud and storm rises out of the water to curse every fleet that will follow him there. Camões had sailed the route himself and lost an eye in North Africa, and he set his country's history inside Virgil's machinery to argue that his countrymen had outdone the ancients they were borrowing.

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Lineage

Attributes

Genre
EpicHistoricalAdventure
Theme
Journey & QuestFame & GloryDuty & HonorColonialismNature vs Civilization
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
HeroExplorerRuler / KingThreshold Guardian
Plot structure
The QuestVoyage and ReturnIn Medias ResFrame NarrativeEpisodic
Hero's Journey (Campbell)
Call to AdventureCrossing the ThresholdSupernatural AidRoad of TrialsThe Ultimate Boon
Quest object (Greimas)
Glory / Fame
Symbol / motif
The SeaThe Ship / BoatThe StormThe HorizonThe IslandThe Crown
Conflict
vs Naturevs Fate / Godsvs Person
Mode / tone
EpicMythicLyrical
Culture / tradition
Portuguese

Closest analogues