| Acknowledgments | |
| Introduction | 3 |
| Pt. 1 | Epic and the Winners | 19 |
| 1 | Epic and Empire: Versions of Actium | 21 |
| 2 | Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid | 50 |
| Pt. 2 | Epic and the Losers | 97 |
| 3 | The Epic Curse and Camoes' Adamastor | 99 |
| 4 | Epics of the Defeated: The Other Tradition of Lucan, Ercilla, and d'Aubigne | 131 |
| Pt. 3 | Tasso and Milton | 211 |
| 5 | Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata | 213 |
| 6 | Tasso, Milton, and the Boat of Romance | 248 |
| 7 | Paradise Lost and the Fall of the English Commonwealth | 268 |
| 8 | David's Census: Milton's Politics and Paradise Regained | 325 |
| Pt. 4 | A Modern Epilogue | 341 |
| 9 | Ossian, Medieval "Epic," and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky | 343 |
| Notes to the Chapters | 369 |
| Index | 427 |
