An epic is an extensive poem that has been composed in an elevated style, that treats a pivotal epoch in the past of a particular people, and that endures because it both entertains its audiences and educates them on issues of ultimate importance. But the images that the term “epic” now evokes—mighty heroes who face fierce foes while traveling to exotic realms in search of special powers—reveal that a rather narrower definition of epic has prevailed in the minds of its users. At some point in its long history, the epic category collapsed into a class of adventure story. Consequently, the critics who employ this category emphasize aspects of epics that concern quests for faraway rewards rather than consolidations of holdings at home, clashes with enemies from outside rather than reconnections with beloved insiders, and aspirations to divine dominion rather than acceptance of human impotence.

Yet a corrective to such critical shortsightedness lies in epics themselves, for these poems portray what happens at home as well as away from it, and thus offer insight into living resignedly with human frailty in addition to striving mightily for the divine. In fact, four poems that have had among the greatest influences on critical conceptions of epic feature figures whose own poetic efforts sharpen the contrast between divine ease and human difficulty. These characters are kings or kings-to-be who appear in the Greek Iliad and Odyssey and the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata.

Those who listen to these singing kings—Achilles in the Iliad, Odysseus in the Odyssey, Kuśa and Lava in the Rāmāyaṇa, and Nala in the Mahābhārata—learn that their songs reflect the epics in which they are embedded. These songs thus reveal the epics’ perspectives on their respective religious ideals, kléos (or heroic glory) in the case of the Greek poems and dharma (or righteousness) in the instance of the Sanskrit ones. Each pair of epics comprises an “affirmative” epic that exhibits the divine ease with which a core ideal is achieved and an “interrogative” epic that demonstrates the human difficulty with which the same ideal is attained.

Reconceptualizing the Iliad and Rāmāyaṇa as affirmative epics and the Odyssey and Mahābhārata as interrogative epics requires relinquishing earlier ideas of what the Greek and Sanskrit epics were. These ideas emerged from the epics themselves, from classical criticism of these works, and from their modern reinterpretations. Tracing the progression of both Greek and Indian notions of epic, then, is possible. But the culturally distinct developments of these epic ideas do not show what they share simply by virtue of being human creations.

So, examining Greek and Indian epic categories separately in the manner of Hellenists and Indologists is not enough. These categories—and therefore the poems that have given rise to them—must be brought together so that they may be reconsidered in light of their mutual illumination. Such comparisons of epic categories and of epics from two different cultures can inform a reformulation of the more general notion of epic that encompasses them. This reconception of epic offers insight into the cross-cultural problem of bridging the human/divine divide on which any poems of this genre center.

To reformulate the category of epic, then, I will study not only how this category came to be applied to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and to the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, but also how the performances of poetic kings in these works refine Greek and Indian ideas of epic. My study comprises three comparisons, the first two of which I will make in methodological support of the third. First, I will compare the different ways in which the Homeric epics and the Cyclic epics, two sets of poems composed in ancient Greece, have been classified by their premodern and modern interpreters, my aim being to explain why it was the Homeric poems rather than their Cyclic counterparts that shaped premodern and modern notions of epic. Second, I will compare the distinct histories that the Homeric epics and the Sanskrit epics have had with the term “epic,” so that I may clarify the respective contributions that these pairs of poems have made to the epic category. My third and central comparison actually is a metacomparison, a comparison of two comparisons. I will begin by comparing the poems performed by kings in the Iliad and the Odyssey, continue by comparing analogous accounts offered by monarchs in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, and end by comparing interculturally the outcomes of these two intracultural comparisons. My purpose in doing so will be to shed light on the different and similar ways in which the ancient Greek and Indian poems depict epic composition in their portrayals of poetic rulers.

The three comparisons that compose my study are of three different types based on three different assumptions about how the comparanda of concern are interrelated. [1] The assumption underlying my first comparison is that the poetic inheritance common to the Homeric epics and the Cyclic epics reflects the derivation of these two sets of works from the same source. In my second comparison, however, I assume that the classification of the Homeric epics has influenced that of the Sanskrit epics because interpreters of the Greek poems have interacted with interpreters of the Sanskrit ones. Yet I assume no such interaction between the royal poems in the Iliad and Odyssey and those in the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, assuming instead that the Sanskrit accounts could have arisen independently of the Greek ones.

In assuming that the traits shared by the Homeric and Cyclic epics reflect their descent from the same source, I am undertaking a genetic comparison. This kind of comparison was made most famous (and infamous) by late-nineteenth-century comparative mythologists who regarded the similarities that they saw among sacred stories related in different Indo-European languages as evidence of a shared Indo-European inheritance. [2] This legacy was held to be one of location as well as literature, of space shared at one time by the groups responsible for the sets of stories being compared. [3] Indeed, the comparative mythologists’ presupposition of a common Indo-European space was shared by their admirer Wilhelm Scherer, a philologist and literary critic who incorporated their project into his comparative poetics as the first of three types of relations that he treated: “The first kind deals, as a rule, with comparative mythology, … and the Indo-European area entailed by the parallels drawn above … may also belong there.” [4] The two other relation types that Scherer goes on to characterize correspond to the diffusionist and analogical approaches to comparison.

In distinguishing the classificatory influence that modern readers of Homer have had on modern readers of Vālmīki and Vyāsa from the spread of epic narratives over time and space, I draw upon a distinction that literary critic G. Gregory Smith drew for the discipline of comparative literature between “the antiquarian and genealogical facts of authorship” (which include “the influence of individual authors and books on other authors and books”) and “the folklore bases” of literature (that is, the collections of tales that have traveled the world over with their tellers). [6] Although Smith calls attention to the authors of literary works while I am spotlighting their interpreters, we both single out individuals interested in these works, in an effort to discern the influences that these individuals have had on one another.

Yet, in studying the influence of readers of the Iliad and Odyssey on readers of the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, I will do well to heed the warnings of scholars studying those who have tried to trace the faceless spread of stories across cultures. [7] Those who claim to have followed the movement of narratives from the place of their creators to the place of their appropriators, and who thus have invested heavily in establishing the direction of story diffusion from one society to another, tend to make too much of the tale-lender’s contribution and the tale-borrower’s obligation. These tale-trackers—like their fellow diffusionists, who have been assessed by historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith [8] —are susceptible to overvaluing what they see as the source and to undervaluing what they see as the receiver, and therefore to asserting the superiority of the source tradition over the receiver tradition in the manner described by historian of religions David M. Freidenreich. [9] For example, folklorist Stith Thompson does little to discount the possibility that “stories usually proceed from culturally higher to culturally lower peoples” when he uses the phrases “diffused from an original center” and “versions close to the archetype” just prior to his discussion of this proposition. [10]

Art historian Partha Mitter sees a similar obeisance to the supposed source in some of the reports of early Western travelers to India who recorded their reactions to the art there. In contrast to those beholders for whom “Indian art consisted of nothing but irrational monsters and horrific demons[, t]he other[s] saw the elegance and grandeur of the temples as clearly proving their classical origins. Some even went so far as to find historical links with Alexander.” [11] The cognitive bridges that these explorers quickly built between India and Greece suggest that the venturers would have subscribed to this belief in the original’s unsurpassability: “We should add—and this again is true of organic nature as well as of human affairs—that all forms show themselves in their purest state at the point of their origin, before they have undergone the changes which later befall them. The leaf of the fern is more fully formed than that of the higher plants which must relinquish the stage to the glory of the blossom. Similarly certain forms of art, the representations of human beauty and the poetic genres of epic, lyric, and drama found their perfect shape among the Greeks.” [12] Like the aforementioned sightseers who managed to peer at the Parthenon though far from Athens, advocates of the diffusionist approach may fall prey to the prejudices that the later form of an artifact can be flawless only if it is a facsimile of the original, and that this imitation is interesting only insofar as it preserves its paradigm.

By comparing first the Homeric epics’ portrayals of poetic rulers, and next the Sanskrit epics’ depictions of such figures, and finally the results of these two comparisons, I will make an analogical metacomparison. Thus, I will regard any patterns that persist across the Greek and Indian epics as ensuing from what Freeman and anthropologist Edward B. Tylor termed “independent invention,” [13] such trends being “the fruit of like circumstances leading to like results.” [14] Such correspondences, therefore, constitute “the likeness of analogy.” [15]

The grounds for such similarity among data likely to be historically independent are broader than those underlying data related through common inheritance or geographical influence. Whereas genetic comparisons rest on similarities reflecting slight divergences from a single cultural source, and diffusionist comparisons are based on commonalities stemming from the sharing of materials across cultures that is associated with migrations, analogical comparisons are founded on parallels that transcend the accident of actual human contact. Thus, in the apparent absence of intercultural interaction that could account for the connections between cultures, the analogical comparativist herself identifies those aspects of shared human existence that are most salient to the comparison that she has constructed. As she selects and connects her comparanda “for … her own good theoretical reasons,” [16] she is free from the stricture of having to gather evidence specifically to establish the inheritance or influence linking her comparanda. But, at the same time, the comparison that she constructs must reveal something important about the comparanda. Her comparison must provide some type of useful information about the comparanda apart from their interconnection through a shared inheritance or direct influence. Her study of her comparanda’s independence must offer insight into them that is different from that afforded by investigations of their inheritance or influence, for “[t]he value of any analogy,” including that at the heart of her comparative analysis, “is dependent upon the depth and richness of its implications.” [17]

So, to keep in sight the epics’ parallel efforts to address their audiences’ religious concerns, I will take up an analogist’s telescope instead of a geneticist’s microscopes or a diffusionist’s movie camera. An analogical comparativist, by conceiving of categories in an effort to fathom the flood of data before her, devises a way to view everything of interest to her, taking up the telescope of intercultural comparative analysis to see as a whole the components that a genetic comparativist would see only separately through the microscopes of intracultural contextual analyses. [20] If a genetic comparativist would move between intracultural microscopes through which she would observe aspects of Greek and Sanskrit epics connected by a common linguistic inheritance, then a diffusionist comparativist would carry a movie camera because she would aim to document the spread of epic stories from one culture to another.