I just finished re-reading the Mahabharata -- not the whole thing, which is over 100,000 verses long, and eight times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. (I should put it on a course syllabus!)I read the shortened prose version by R. K Narayan that was published in 1978. What an amazing story it is, with echoes in so much other literature, including Homer and Shakespeare. Hard to give the plot of a 100,000-verse epic in a nutshell, but here's my attempt:

A blind king struggles to please both his own one hundred sons, the Kauravas, and his five nephews, the Pandava brothers. Duryodhana, his son, is consumed with jealousy over his cousins' good fortune and won't rest until they are destroyed. Yudhistira, the eldest Pandava brother struggles with his desire to escape conflict against his duty to perform the tasks of a warrior.

One of the most interesting characters in the epic is Draupadi, the woman who ends up the wife of all five Pandava brothers because of a slip of the tongue from their mother. When she is dragged from her palace bedroom, humiliated, paraded in front of crowds wearing only a thin sari and called a whore, she begs for one of her warrior husbands to come to her aid. But they all fail her. She says, "I do not understand why they all stand there transfixed, speechless and like imbeciles." The god Krishna hears her, though, and performs a miracle so that no matter how much the men unravel her sari, heaping a pile of cloth on the floor, her original sari stays on her body to protect her dignity.

I like the story because of its complex portrayal of human dilemmas. I feel Draupadi's rage at her husbands' powerlessness, but also understand their desire to avoid the conflict that they know will end in the destruction of their family members.

It boggles the mind to read and be moved by a text that was composed in about 400 BCE, but that was probably being recited orally hundreds of years earlier.