A. Heroic epics were popular at the time.
The neoclassical era, as the name itself says, wanted to revive Classical literature - that from the age of ancient Greece and Rome, which was considered to be the highest form of art. During that time, heroic epics such as the Iliad, the Odyssey (Greece), the Aeneid (Rome) were very popular, and this is something that the Neoclassicists wanted to imitate. This is why they wrote heroic epic poems during the mid-eighteenth century, as an homage to the Classical era.
