SOURCE: “History and Prophecy in Camões's Os Lusíadas,” in Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, Winter, 1985, pp. 145-50.

In the following essay, Dixon studies Camões's blending of prophesy and history in The Lusiads.

Few would disagree with the assertion that Camões's Os Lusíadas,¹ as history, is an extremely imaginative history, formed at least as much by the poet's mentality as it is by the events it records.² Yet the difference between Os Lusíadas and other, more properly “historical” records is one of degree, and not of kind. If we define history as discourse about past events rather than as the events themselves, then any history must bear the imaginative imprint of its narrator. The happenings of a particular time span are like a crude mass of stone, with no significant shape, and the historian is like a sculptor. The moment he decides that some...