the mighty dead - why homer matters (adam nicolson)

Nicolson’s book about Homer is compelling. The challenge is laid down by the title and the book, to my surprise, lived up to it. Nicolson’s remit is broad, from Keats to Simone Weil to Sinuhe, an ancient Egyptian writer. His speculation about the origin of Homer’s twin poems takes him from the Irish coast to Bahrain. The key theory that emerges from the book is a fascinatingly counter-intuitive one to our common understanding of what it means to be Greek. Rather than being the great seers of civilisation, Nicolson presents Homer’s Greeks as savage warrior people, emerging from the steppes of Central Asia. The Iliad charts their confrontation with the far more advanced civilisations of Asia Minor, which they both ransacked and stole from. The book’s historical range is vast, covering at least ten centuries, which clearly gives scope for a great deal of more speculative hypothesis. Still, it’s the very scale of the book which gives it weight. Nicolson is looking at history through a long lens, and through that lens we discern the ebb and flow of power as it has been exercised across the Mediterranean and Western seaboard of the Atlantic, over the course of thousands of years. Within this, Homer’s tales capture a more elemental version of our origin myth (the ‘our’ standing for all those peoples and civilisations locked into that geographical zone), and indeed, through Homer, Nicolson traces the conflicts which existed prior to the birth of the idea of Europe or classical civilisation, as we now understand it.

nb - The above was written a few weeks ago. It would be more than feasible to view the current war, initiated by Russia against Ukraine, within the terms of Nicolson’s Homer. Ukraine’s much lauded European values standing for the Trojans, against the more Philistine band of Russians, coming from the Eurasian steppe, who have no hesitation in raising cities in order to achieve predominance. This observation is offered in order to reaffirm that Nicolson’s innovative reading of the historical impulses which lead to the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey feels persuasive, and it is one of the book’s great achievements to show how culture is a thread that binds across the centuries, how Homer was writing for a society so ancient that we don’t even really know where it existed, but he was also writing for every generation that came since in this place we call Europe, and beyond.