The Persistence of Epic Novels

Plato and Aristotle, depicted by Raphael

Aristotle, in the Poetics, records a sentiment probably shared by 3,000 years of classical studies students: the epics of Homer are too damn long. The Iliad and the Odyssey each comprise twenty-four “books,” each book running hundreds of lines. In the ancient Athenian recitation competitions, one speaker would memorize one book, and one or two would speak per day, meaning recitations lasted anywhere from nearly two weeks, to nearly a month.

To Aristotle, this was excessive, and he asked for “epics” which a single performer could recite in one or two nights. But Aristotle, writing half a millennium after Homer, might’ve missed something important. Classicist Barry B. Powell suggests, in the introduction to his translation of the Odyssey, that Homer’s performances probably did last only one night. Today, when Homer is “required reading,” we forget he was pop entertainment in his day.

Powell postulates that Homer was probably illiterate, and didn’t have his massive epics memorized. Instead, Powell suggests that Homer improvised his poetry on well-known themes, and each performance was unique. They probably lasted for one- or two-night engagements, But when somebody finally pledged to transcribe Homer’s poetry, Powell believes, Homer composed in long-form, unpacking details usually elided, to create a sweeping saga intended for the page.

This difference matters. Even three millennia ago, Homer realized that people reading a book committed themselves to something vaster, with a willingness to persevere across the span of days. Works intended for public recitation generally run much shorter—it takes approximately two hours to read the entire Gospel of Mark aloud. But books are a different order of beast, and Homer, transcribing early in the medium’s history, already knew that.

Now, as then, we have conflicting desires for short-form and longer entertainments. There’s nothing new under the sun. We want stories we can devour in one sitting, often already prepared for the next one, and we want stories that take days to consume, which we must pursue doggedly. But the changing media market has split our interests. First television, and more recently the internet, swallowed up the market for short-form, one-evening entertainments.

An undated traditional depiction of Homer

Authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote short stories for commercial purposes. The magazines in which they published, like The Atlantic, the Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker, had large audiences and paid handsomely. At his peak, Fitzgerald notoriously tore off short stories for magazine markets to get paid, and wrote the novels for which he’s now more famous to indulge a literary inclination that wouldn’t have paid particularly well.

Since Fitzgerald’s time, the magazine market has become considerably less lucrative. The Atlantic no longer publishes fiction and The New Yorker mostly only publishes well-known names or controversial content that drives engagement. A handful of genre magazines pay moderate rates, and art purists still regularly launch small-circulation “zines,” but the short-form entertainment market has moved mainly onto electronic media.

Conversely, contra Aristotle, the book continues to harbor the epic format he thought Homer overstretched. From Dante and Milton to J.R.R. Tolkien and Tom Clancy, authors preserve Homer’s physical length and dramatic sweep, because people really want that scale and that depth of immersion. People want an “entertainment” that will take them out of themselves and their own lives for literally days, even weeks, at a stretch.

And electronic media largely can’t provide that. Compare the prose and streaming versions of one of our time’s greatest epic authors. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series certainly has its detractors, but Jordan’s audience remained loyal, even when many felt his middle novels lagged. Not only were the books physically and thematically massive, but his story unfolded across multiple books, and readers remained immersed in his milieu for years.

But the streaming media adaptation of Jordan’s books largely fell flat. Not only did it take two years to produce a second season, even with the storyline already written, but when the product finally emerged, it suffered from cost overruns and content bloat. The audience from Jordan’s novels disliked the compromises which the transition between media forced, and the series has struggled to find a non-book audience.

Simply put, Aristotle was wrong. Audiences don’t find the length, density, and complexity of Homer’s epics off-putting. Indeed, as TV and Netflix continue consuming our short-form entertainments, audiences not only still buy books, but they support longer books and convoluted book series. Aristotle thought the hoi polloi weren’t lettered enough to follow stories that took days to develop, but given the choice, that’s apparently what audiences want.