Os Lusíadas

Os Lusiadas, known in English as The Lusiads, is a Portuguese epic poem by Luis Vaz de Camoes, composed over roughly 1524 to 1580 and first published in 1572. Written in ten cantos comprising 1,102 stanzas and 8,816 lines in ottava rima, the poem takes as its central subject the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's sea voyage around Africa to India, weaving the historical voyage together with intervening Greek gods who take sides for and against Portuguese expansion, in a manner consciously modeled on Homer's epics and Virgil's Aeneid. Camoes is believed to have completed much of the poem while stationed in Macau and to have finished it in the years following his return from Portugal's eastern territories. Regarded as the supreme achievement of Portuguese-language literature, the poem functions as Portugal's national epic in much the way the Iliad and Odyssey served ancient Greece and the Aeneid served Rome, celebrating Portuguese seafaring and imperial expansion through the framework of classical epic convention.