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. 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. 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.
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. 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 third and central comparison actually is a metacomparison, a comparison of two comparisons.
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.
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. My study comprises three comparisons, the first two of which I will make in methodological support of the third. 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.
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