In the rôle of the returned pilgrim, then, he wrote his epic. An epic in the nineteenth century! In our days no one believes in the possibility of such a thing. A clearer comprehension than that possessed by any former age of the historical conditions which went to the production of the great national epics of antiquity has convinced us of the vanity of endeavouring in modern times to rival works of the freshness of the _Iliad_ or the naïveté (in spite of a high degree of culture) of the _Odyssey_. Just as little as it would occur to any real poet to-day to imitate the _Vedas_, the _Psalms of David_, or the _Voluspa_, would it occur to him to attempt to compete with the immortal works in which, late in the morning of their days, nations, childlike and yet mature, have told the story of their gods and of their heroes--as the Greeks have done in their national epics, the Germans in the _Nibelungenlied_, and the Finns in _Kalevala_. The epics which, like Virgil's and Tasso's, Camoens', Klopstock's, and Voltaire's, are conscious, laboured imitations of these old popular works, and which have transformed the miraculous element in them into dead epic machinery, have never taken rank with their models; their comparative value depends upon how close, in time and in spirit, they are to these models. The more naïveté they display, the colder they leave us. The epic poems written in modern times which have not been failures--Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_, or Mickiewicz's _Herr (Pan) Tadeusz_--have entirely dispensed with the appurtenances of the old epic. But this Chateaubriand had not the slightest intention of doing. Far from it--he rather meant to add to their number, in order to exhibit the vast superiority of the Christian to the antique apparatus.
As he has no command of verse, he determines to write his epic in prose; but, great master of prose as he is, we know in anticipation how he will grope after a style. And we are sensible, as we read, of a confusion of influences--Homer, the Revelation of St. John, Dante and Milton, the Fathers of the Church and Suetonius. The action takes place in the days of Diocletian; one half of the characters are pagans, the other half Christians. The hero, Eudore, wins the heart of a young pagan girl; he converts her, and they die together as martyrs in the arena of the Colosseum. Her father is a Greek priest of the Homeric gods. Some of the events happen in ancient Gaul.