SOURCE: “The Lusiads: From National Epic to Universal Myth,” in UNESCO Courier, No. 4, April, 1989, pp. 26-7.

In the following essay, Lourenço emphasizes Camões's blending of the Portuguese voyages of discovery with the Petrarchan myth of universal love in The Lusiads.

The Western maritime discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in which Portugal played a leading role, were the culmination of an odyssey which had begun in ancient times. They extended the bounds of the adventure embarked on long before by the Phoenicians and the Greeks to all the seas of the world. The cycle of modern discoveries was symbolically closed in 1520 by Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator who sailed for the King of Spain. After him there began an era of methodical, scientific exploration of what the twentieth-century poet Fernando Pessoa called the “endless sea”, the mare nostrum of the Romans enlarged to global dimensions...