 Today, the word epic is an adjective that means something like big, grandiose, extreme, or even awesome. It's usually used for positive qualities, but it can also be employed to indicate intensity, like in the epic fail memes that were so popular in the early 2000s. But if we go back to the roots of the word epic, we find that its origins are really different from its current meaning. The word epic comes from the ancient Greek word epos, which simply means word, narrative, or song. So how did the word epic evolve from something that basically just means words, to a blanket adjective for intensity or extremeness? The answer lies in the history of literature. If we look at its earliest use, epos is just what it says, words, narrative, and songs. The earliest epics were poems that told a story, and that were performed out loud. Of course, these earliest epics, like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, survived today because they were eventually written down, but they circulated as orally performed poems, sometimes for hundreds of years, before being copied down in texts. In fact, the author known as Homer probably never existed. He's a catch-all name we give to many generations of performers who told, retold, and shaped the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey over time. These early Homeric epics had some qualities in common beyond the fact that they were orally performed stories. First, they were about people whose personal qualities were considered exemplary in their culture, civilization, or country. In other words, they were heroes, like Achilles or Odysseus. Second, they took place in settings that were universal in one way or another. Whether the narrative took place over a wide range of places and times, it involved a lot of travel, or it used a single place, like the Walls of Troy, to explore ideas and themes that ranged widely over human experience. Third, these early epics often invoked deities, or the supernatural, Athena, Zeus, Ares, and so forth. Finally, an epic was often used or read as a sort of foundational cultural text. So this last quality is incredibly important. The Iliad and the Odyssey, which were long poems about heroes doing heroic deeds and helped or hindered by the gods, ultimately came to represent something about a culture itself. They were the ideals that people wanted to live up to or rebelled by rejecting. Today, we apply the word epic to all sorts of long works of literature, often ancient ones, that encapsulate our sense of the values of a given society. So not just the Greek Iliad and Odyssey are epics, but so too is the Latin and Nied, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sanskrit and Mahabrata in Ramayana, and the Old English Beowulf. Even Milton's Paradise Lost is sometimes classified as an epic. Today, an epic is considered an epic if it's a long story about a hero that serves as an organizing point of cultural or social identity. It might be used to describe any creative media that has a broad scope, that speaks broadly to the human condition, that is long or large, and that is ambitious in its artistic goals. So, for instance, we might even think of Star Wars as a type of cinematic epic. Over time, then, the connotation of the word epic has come to be identified not just with the form an epic took, a.k.a. the fact that it was words spoken out loud, but instead with the notion of being large and looming large culturally. This description might sound overly broad, but that's how it goes when we're defining genre. The texts we identify within a genre are always changing, and so are our ideas of the genre. No epic obeys all of the conventions of epic, and that's a testament to the immense creativity of storytellers. So, which of your favorite stories do you consider epics?