“There are problems in this for the modern reader. Few of us share the extent and depth of Camões’s knowledge or the classics, and the pleasures of recognition, that agreeable Renaissance game of spotting how the poet has adapted a favourite passage from a classical author and refurbished it to serve a contemporary purpose, plays little part in our reading.”

(Landeg White, introduction to Luis Vaz de Camões’s The Lusíads, p. xiii.)