Why Homer matters

Review by Choice Review

Although not the work of a specialist and not addressed to specialists, this book displays an impressive amount of knowledge about the Iliad and the Odyssey and may interest even professional classicists. An award-winning writer, Nicholson reviews all aspects of the Homeric poems and addresses difficult questions that have been and still are the bread and butter of Homeric scholarship: Who or what was Homer? Where and when were the Iliad and the Odyssey composed? What is the relationship between the two works? How were these texts transmitted? All this is a praiseworthy attempt to bring Homer back to life and address the implied question that gives the book its title. Nicholson writes in a clear, fluid prose with apparently effortless ease; his vivid descriptions of landscapes and archaeological remains and his passionate engagement with history make this book a page-turner. Classicists will no doubt find fault with some of Nicholson's statements, but they will also be grateful to the author for explaining to the larger public in such an appealing fashion why Homer is not only unique but also relevant and necessary today. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers. --Pura Nieto, Brown University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

"HOMER HAS BECOME a kind of scripture for me, an ancient book, full of urgent imperatives and ancient meanings, most of them half discerned, to be puzzled over. It is a source of wisdom." So begins the third chapter of Adam Nicolson's highly accessible new book, "Why Homer Matters," in which he compares his relationship with epic poetry to a form of possession, a "colonization of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past." The world needs more Adam Nicolsons, unabashedly passionate evangelists for the power of ancient poetry to connect us with our collective past, illuminate our personal struggles and interrogate our understanding of human history. For centuries, the study of Greek literature has been seen as the province of career academics. But Nicolson's amateurism (in the best, etymological, sense of the word: from the Latin amare, "to love") and globe-trotting passion for his subject is contagious, intimating that it is impossible to comprehend Homer's poems from an armchair or behind a desk. If you've never read the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey," or your copies have been collecting dust since college, Nicolson's book is likely to inspire you to visit or revisit their pages. According to Nicolson, a British baron who has written books on subjects that span the making of the King James Bible, the challenges and joys of farming, nautical voyages, and long walks through France, "you don't acquire Homer; Homer acquires you." Nicolson describes how he set out on a personal odyssey from the coast of Scotland to the gates of Hades in search of the origins of Greek poetry and Western consciousness. In all of this, he is most at home as a writer when describing landscapes, as in his depiction of Homeric Hades by way of the estuary at Huelva in southwestern Spain: "Flakes of white quartzite shine through the water between ribs of rock that veer from red to tangerine to ocher and rust to flame-colored, flesh-colored, sick and livid." As Nicolson relates, Homer, the blind bard of Chios who supposedly composed the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," may never have existed. Or, if he did, he most likely wasn't the sole author of the epic poems for which he became famous. Instead, he may have culled, arranged and interpolated these foundational myths from within a living, oral tradition reaching back - through the Greek Dark Ages - to a primitive, preliterate era of Bronze Age wars and warriors sprawled across the Eurasian plains. "The poems," Nicolson writes, "were composed by a man standing at the top of a human pyramid. He could not have stood there without the pyramid beneath him, and the pyramid consisted not only of the earlier poets in the tradition but of their audiences too." This is the central idea behind Nicolson's book, which traces the origins of the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath - by way of the Minoan ruins of Knossos, the great library of Alexandria, and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens - to a period 1,000 or more years earlier than the one suggested by what he defines as the reigning orthodoxy. Nicolson contends that the epic poems reflect "the violence and sense of strangeness of about 1800 B.C. recollected in the tranquillity of about 1300 B.C.," though not captured in writing until roughly 700 B.C. And so he believes that whoever wrote the poems down belonged to "a culture emerging from a dark age, looking to a future but also looking back to a past, filled with nostalgia for the years of integrity, simplicity, nobility and straightforwardness." It is difficult to assess Nicolson's theory, which is based on a conjecture that the "Iliad" describes a pre-palatial warrior culture that seems to align well with the "world of the gold-encrusted kings buried in the shaft graves at Mycenae," now dated to the 17th and 16th centuries B.C. But as a thought exercise, it is often gripping and, at times, electrifying. According to Nicolson, "Epic, which was invented after memory and before history, occupies a third space in the human desire to connect the present to the past: It is the attempt to extend the qualities of memory over the reach of time." The purpose of epic "is to make the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives, to make the great stories of long ago beautiful and painful now." The Romanian scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade called this basic human impulse - to connect our quotidian existence, through ritual and myth, with the lives and struggles of the great heroes of the past - the "eternal return." In the telling and retelling of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," we imbue our insignificant lives with meaning, transporting ourselves to a mythical time, while bringing the heroic age into our own. Throughout the book, Nicolson describes moments when his own life has been elevated or illuminated by the epics - such as his sailing across the Celtic Sea with the "Odyssey" fastened to his compass binnacle, tied open to the story of the sirens - but also moments when harrowing experiences, including being raped at knife point in the Syrian desert, have revealed to him something powerful within the poems. THE HOMERIC EPICS are long, contradictory, repetitive, composite works, riddled with anachronisms, archaic vocabulary, metric filler and exceedingly graphic brutality. Over the millenniums, Nicolson asserts, they have been cleaned, scrubbed and sanitized by generations of translators, editors, librarians and scholars, in order to protect readers from the dangers of the atavistic world lurking just below the surface of the words. He writes that everyone from the editors at the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria to the great 18th-century poet Alexander Pope wished to civilize or tame the poems, "wanted to make Homer proper, to pasteurize him and transform him into something acceptable for a well-governed city." Part of Nicolson's objective is to follow the poems back to the vengeful, frighteningly violent time and culture from which they came, and to restore some of their rawness. For Nicolson, the commonly held belief that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were products of the late eighth century B.C., a period of Greek resurgence and prosperity, cannot account for the heterogeneity of the poems and all they contain. He prefers the view that, instead of being the creation of a single man, let alone of a single time, "Homer reeks of long use." Try thinking of Homer as a "plural noun," he suggests, made up of "the frozen and preserved words of an entire culture." Seen through this lens, the ancient poems appear as a bridge between the present and an otherwise inaccessible past, a rare window into a moment of cultural convergence around 2000 B.C., when East met West, North met South, and Greek consciousness was forged in the crucible of conflict between a savage warrior culture from the flat grasslands of Eurasia and the wealthy, sophisticated residents of cities in the eastern Mediterranean. "Homer," Nicolson writes, "in a miracle of transmission from one end of human civilization to the other, continues to be as alive as anything that has ever lived." Reading "Why Homer Matters" makes one yearn for a time, almost lost to us now, when many others shared Nicolson's enthusiasm. The poems appear as a bridge between the present and an otherwise inaccessible past. BRYAN DOERRIES is a stage director and a translator. His first book, "The Theater of War: What Ancient Tragedies Can Teach Us Today," will be published next fall.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 21, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

Nicolson (God's Secretaries, 2003) offers a sprawling, lyrical, and frequently intimate exploration of the epic poet. His journey begins with an insight following a harrowing night sailing across the Celtic Sea: Homer is not a mere chronicler of obscure history but, rather, a continually relevant guide to life, a giver of enigmatic puzzles from which profound commentary upon the human condition can be extracted. The Iliad's questions about fate and the past's hold upon the present remain relevant; the commingled beauty and horror of Achilles' bloody rampage continues to present unsettling questions about our taste for violence. So too with The Odyssey, in which tender homecoming is brutally fused with utter pitilessness. Theorizing that Homer's stories significantly predate the eighth century, when they were first written down, Nicolson maintains that the hero-culture they portray remains as immediate and as seductive as ever. But this is a very personal journey, and the questions Nicolson sees in Homer often have to do with masculinity and its relationship with violence. Nicolson feels the world of Homer aboard his sailboat, and on windswept Greek islands, and he turns to Homer to understand his feelings when, as a young man, he was raped at knifepoint near the ancient city of Palmyra. In the end, it is Nicolson's passion for his subject that animates this selection and elevates textual explication into a paean.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

British author Nicolson (The Gentry) contemplates the towering legacy of the Iliad and Odyssey, while probing the mysteries of Homer's identity and birthplace. Scholars insist on the eighth century B.C.E. as the origin of the epics, but Nicolson provides intriguing archeological and linguistic evidence that they are considerably older, including Milman Perry's studies placing the epics within an oral tradition of an illiterate era. Nicolson's language does credit to his muse, describing Homer's style as a "neck-gripping physical urgency," and Achilles as "a beacon of hate... radiant with horror," whose combat is a "crazed berserker frenzy of... grief-fueled rampage." He shares personal feelings about Homer becoming his "guidebook to life" and a "kind of scripture," even a means of therapeutic reflection after a traumatic event. However, the cultural differences between the roaming warrior Greeks and the cultured, established Trojans elicit shortsighted comparisons to modern gang life. More careful consideration is given to the poems' major themes and settings, particularly the islands Odysseus visited, and Nicolson makes a strong case for the Odyssey's "Hades" location lying in Southern Spain, perhaps symbolizing a Bronze Age copper mine near Rio Tinto. Nicolson's penetrative insight into the Homeric universe is a largely successful piece of scholarship accessible to a wide audience. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta, Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Nicolson (God's Secretaries) interprets Achilles, the most powerful warrior in Homer's Iliad, as descending from ancient horse-mounted nomads on the Eurasian Steppes and representative of individualism, the rejection of authority and materialism, and antiurbanism-aspects all embodied by his nemesis Agamemnon. This is a highly dubious reading as Achilles is perceived in Greek mythology to be a quintessential hero, and his rejection of Agamemnon is a rejection solely of the man. Achilles is often seen as the best; a vital and necessary influence for the Hellenes to triumph at Troy. If Nicolson's claim that Achilles is an outsider is correct, then the rebuke from his fellow heroes would be stronger. Yet they intuitively understand his stance and are sympathetic, never considering Achilles as anything less than the best of them. Nevertheless, Nicolson's argument is intriguing and the author's love of and engagement with Homer is contagious. This interpretation will leave readers wanting to put the book down and revisit the epics. VERDICT There is much to be said about an author who can reignite passion and debate in works that are nearly three millennia old, as such, recommended for Homer enthusiasts interested in a contentious interpretation. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/14.]-Evan M. Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An archaeology of the Homeric mind. In this gracefully written and deeply informed book, Nicolson (The Gentry: Stories of the English, 2011, etc.), a fellow of Britain's Society of Antiquaries, excavates the origins of Homer's magisterial epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Arguing against the "current orthodoxy" that both books emerged from the eighth century B.C., the author contends that Homer evokes a much earlier period: Bronze Age Eurasia, around 2000 B.C., when seminomadic warriors of the northern steppes confronted the more sophisticated culture of the eastern Mediterranean. In the north, vicious gangs marauded, while in the south, sailing ships replaced paddled canoes, enabling men to travel farther and faster, infusing the culture with new ideas and goods. "This newly energized world," writes Nicolson, "is the meeting of cultures that Homer records." Nicolson sees the Iliad as retrospective, "a poem about fate and the demands that fate puts on individual lives, the inescapability of death and of the past," while the Odyssey, "for all its need to return home, consistently toys with the offers of a new place and a new life, a chance to revise what you have been given." Drawing upon archaeological discoveries and teasing out etymological threads, Nicolson finds in Homer's work "myths of the origin of Greek consciousness" that the West has inherited. He resists the idea that Homer promotes "the sense that justice resides in personal revenge." Instead, Homer poses transcendent questions: "[W]hat matters more, the individual or the community, the city or the hero? What is life, something of everlasting value or a transient and hopeless irrelevance?" In a universe inhabited by capricious gods, writes Nicolson, Homer offers readers "his fearless encounter with the dreadful, his love of love and hatred of death, the sheer scale of his embrace, his energy and brightness, his resistance to nostalgia." Nicolson's spirited exploration illuminates our own indelible past. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 • MEETING HOMER One evening ten years ago I started to read Homer in English. With an old friend, George Fairhurst, I had just sailed from Falmouth to Baltimore in southwest Ireland, 250 miles across the Celtic Sea. We had set off three days earlier in our wooden ketch, the Auk , forty-two feet from stem to stern, a vessel which had felt big enough in Falmouth, not so big out in the Atlantic. It had been a ruinous journey. A mile or so out from the shelter of Falmouth we realized our instruments were broken, but we had been preparing for too long, were hungry to go, and neither of us felt like turning back. A big storm came through that night, force 8 gusting 9 to 10, west of Scilly, and we sailed by the stars when it was clear, by the compass in the storm, four hours on, four hours off, for that night, the next day and the following night. The seas at times had been huge, the whole of the bow plunging into them, burying the bowsprit up to its socket, solid water coming over the foredeck and driving back toward the wheel, so that the side-decks were like mill-sluices, running with the Atlantic. After forty hours we arrived. George's face looked as if he had been in a fight, flushed and bruised, his eyes sunk and hollow in it. We dropped anchor in the middle of Baltimore harbor, its still water reflecting the quayside lights, only our small wake disturbing them, and I slept for sixteen hours straight. Now, the following evening, I was lying in my bunk, the Auk tied up alongside the Irish quay, with the Odyssey , translated by the great American poet-scholar Robert Fagles, in my hand. I had never understood Homer as a boy. At school his poems were taught to us in Greek, as if they were a branch of math. The master drew the symbols on the green chalkboard, and we ferreted out the sense line by line, picking bones from fish. The archaic nature of Homer's vocabulary, the pattern of long and short syllables in the verse, the remote and uninteresting nature of the gods, like someone else's lunchtime account of a dream from the night before--what was that to any of us? Where was the life in it? How could this remoteness compare to the urgent realities of our own lives, our own lusts and anxieties? The difficulties and strangeness of the Greek were little more than a prison of obscurity to me, happily abandoned once the exam was done. Homer stayed irrelevant. Now I had Fagles's words in front of me. Half idly, I had brought his translation of the Odyssey with me on the Auk , as something I thought I might look at on my own sailing journey in the North Atlantic. But as I read, a man in the middle of his life, I suddenly saw that this is not a poem about then and there , but now and here . The poem describes the inner geography of those who hear it. Every aspect of it is grand metaphor. Odysseus is not sailing on the Mediterranean but through the fears and desires of a man's life. The gods are not distant creators but elements within us: their careless pitilessness, their flaky and transient interests, their indifference, their casual selfishness, their deceit, their earth-shaking footfalls. I read Fagles that evening, and again as we sailed up the west coast of Ireland. I began to see Homer as a guide to life, even as a kind of scripture. The sea in the Odyssey is out to kill you--at one point Hermes, the presiding genius of Odysseus's life, says, "Who would want to cross the unspeakable vastness of the sea? There are not even any cities there"--but hidden within it are all kinds of delicious islands, filled with undreamed-of delights, lovely girls and beautiful fruits, beautiful landscapes where you don't have to work, fantasy lands, each in their different way seducing and threatening the man who chances on them. But every one is bad for him. Calypso, a goddess, unbelievably beautiful, makes him sleep with her night after night, for seven years; Circe feeds him delicious dinners for a whole year, until finally one of his men asks him what he thinks he is doing. If he goes on like this, none of them will ever see their homes again. And is that what he wants? In part I saw the Odyssey as the story of a man who is sailing through his own death: the sea is deathly, the islands are deathly, he visits Hades at the very center of the poem and he is thought dead by the people who love him at home, a pile of white bones rotting on some distant shore. He longs for life, and yet he cannot find it. When he hears stories told of his own past, he cannot bear it, wraps his head in his "sea-blue" cloak and weeps for everything he has lost. It was Odysseus I fell in love with that summer as we sailed north to the Hebrides, Orkney and the Faroes: the many-wayed, flickering, crafty man, "the man of twists and turns," as Fagles calls him, translating the Greek word polytropos , the man driven off course, the man who suffers many pains, the man who is heartsick on the open sea. His life itself is a twisting, and maybe, I thought, that is his destiny: he can never emerge into the plain calm of a resolution. The islands in his journey are his own failings. Home, Ithaca, is the longed-for moment when those failings will at last be overcome. Odysseus's muddle is his beauty. He is no victim. He suffers, but he does not buckle. His virtue is his elasticity, his rubber vigor. If he is pushed, he bends, but he bends back, and that half-giving strength was to me a beautiful model for a man. He is all navigation, subtlety, invention, dodging the rocks, storytelling, cheating and survival. He can be resolute, fierce and destructive when need be, and clever, funny and loving when need be. There is no requirement to choose between these qualities; Odysseus makes them all available. Like Shakespeare and the Bible, we all know his stories in advance, but one in particular struck me that summer sailing on the Auk . We had left the Arans late the evening before, and George had taken her all night up the dark of the Galway coast. We changed places at dawn, and in that early morning, with a cup of tea in my hand and the sun rising over the Irish mainland, I took her north, heading for the Inishkeas and the corner of County Mayo, before turning there and making for Scotland. The wind was a big easterly, coming in gusts over the Mayo hills, the sun white and heatless. George and my son Ben, who had joined us, were asleep below. There were shearwaters cruising the swells beside us, black, liquid, effortless birds, like the sea turned aerial, and a fulmar now and then hung in the slot between the headsail and the main, flying with us on the current of air. The Auk surged on the wind that morning, heeling out into the Atlantic, churning her way north, horselike in her strength. I don't know when I have felt so happy. Steering across the swells, holding the wheel against them as they came through, releasing it as they fell away, I tied the great Robert Fagles translation of the Odyssey on the compass binnacle, holding it open with a bungee cord against the wind. That morning I read the story of the Sirens. Just as we do, Odysseus knows he will be exposed to the songs that the strange, birdlike creatures sing to mariners and with which they lure passing ships onto the shore, wrecking them there and then leaving the men to linger until they die. The only way Odysseus can get past the Sirens is to cut up a round cake of beeswax, knead it in his hands, softening the wax in the heat of the sun, and then press plugs of it into the ears of the sailors. Once they are deafened, he has himself lashed to the mainmast, so that any desire he may have to steer toward the delicious honeyed voices can have no effect on his men. Only if he is powerless can he listen to them singing from their meadow, as Robert Fagles described it, "starred with flowers." That meadow of death is the most desirable place any man could imagine. It is yet another island into which a man might long to sink and die. A dead calm falls on the sea. The men brail up the sail and then sit to their oars. The Sirens, just within shouting distance of the ship, taunt Odysseus as he passes. They can give him wisdom if he will come to them and listen. If he will let them, they will make him understand. They press on him the comfort and beauty of what they have to offer. They sing to him, and Odysseus longs for them, his heart throbbing for them, as Fagles says, and with his eyebrows gestures to the crew to set him free. But the crew won't respond. Deaf to all persuasion, they bind him tighter and row the ship through and past. Never is Homer more rapid. Like Odysseus's "sea-swift" ship, the whole scene sweeps past in forty lines. Rarely can something so brief have spread its ripples so wide. But the point is this: the song the Sirens sing is not any old crooning seduction tune. It is the story of the Iliad itself. "We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured On the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so-- All that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all." The Sirens sing the song of the heroic past. That is the meadow of death. They want to draw Odysseus in with tempting stories of what he once was. And Odysseus, after his years of suffering and journeying, of frustration in the beautiful arms of Calypso, whose name means "the hidden one," the goddess of oblivion, longs to return to the active world, the world of simplicity and straightforwardness he had known at Troy. The Sirens are wise to that; they know the longing in his heart. The prospect of clear-cut heroism summons him, and he struggles to escape his bindings. But his men, like the poem itself, know better, and they tie him tighter to his ship. They won't be wrecked on the illusions of nostalgia, the longing for that heroized, antique world, because, as the Odyssey knows, to live well in the world, nostalgia must be resisted; you must stay with your ship, stay tied to the present, remain mobile, keep adjusting the rig, work with the swells, watch for a wind-shift, watch as the boom swings over, engage, in other words, with the muddle and duplicity and difficulty of life. Don't be tempted into the lovely simplicities that the heroic past seems to offer. That is what Homer and the Sirens and Robert Fagles all said to me that day. I can still see the sunlight coming sheening off the backs of the swells that morning, as they made their way past and under me, combed and slicked with the sea-froth running down them, every swell the memory of storms in the Atlantic far to the west, steepening to the east and then ruining themselves ashore. The Auk sailed north with the shearwaters, and the morning became unforgettable. It was when this book began. I thank God I met Homer again that summer. He was suddenly alongside me, a companion and an ally, the most truly reliable voice I had ever known. It was like discovering poetry itself, or the dead speaking. As I read and reread the Odyssey in translation, I suddenly felt that here was the unaffected truth, here was someone speaking about fate and the human condition in ways that other people only seem to approach obliquely; and that directness, that sense of nothing between me and the source, is what gripped me. I felt like asking, "Why has no one told me about this before?" The more I looked at the poems in different translations, and the more I tried to piece bits of them together in the Greek with a dictionary, the more I felt Homer was a guidebook to life. Here was a form of consciousness that understood fallibility and self-indulgence and vanity, and despite that knowledge didn't surrender hope of nobility and integrity and doing the right thing. Before I read Pope's Preface to the Iliad , or Matthew Arnold's famous lectures on translating Homer, I knew that this was the human spirit on fire, rapidity itself, endlessly able to throw off little sidelights like the sparks thrown off by the wheels of an engine hammering through the night. Speed, scale, violence, threat; but every spark with humanity in it. Copyright © 2014 by Adam Nicolson Excerpted from The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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