Homer’s epics have lessons to teach us all

 
Ultimate weapon: Brad Pitt as Greek hero Achilles in the 2004 film Troy
Henry Power22 May 2014

The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson (William Collins, £25)

At school, Adam Nicolson was made to study The Iliad and The Odyssey in the original Greek, “ferreting out the sense line by line, picking bones from fish”. He truly discovered Homer much later, when reading The Odyssey on a rough sailing expedition. He realised that these ancient songs (the present scholarly consensus is that they were first written down around the eighth century BC) spoke meaningfully to his own experience. Like other readers before him, Nicolson felt an immediate connection with Homer — “a sense of nothing between me and the source”. The Mighty Dead is partly a celebration of Homer’s poems and partly an attempt to understand the world that produced them. But above all it is about Nicolson’s discovery of Homer: his realisation that these poems spoke to him about his life and condition.

Despite Nicolson’s sense that Homer is speaking directly to him, many centuries — and many readers — intervene. Nicolson fills his book with other moments of Homeric discovery: Keats staying up late reading Chapman’s Homer with a friend, and then writing a sonnet about it (“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken”); the Californian scholar Milman Parry listening to a Yugoslavian bard and understanding how the Homeric poems were made; the archaeologist John Boardman climbing up to a Mycenaean hilltop fortress, and realising that the Homeric songs would have been sung in a rugged place such as this. These discoveries, like Nicolson’s, were made by readers who knew Homer well but had to wait for their moment of epiphany.

The lesson seems to be that life equips us to read Homer. Nicolson illustrates the principles of Homeric versification with reference to the poems he improvises for his own children; his own near-death experience in the Syrian desert colours his understanding of Homeric battle scenes. Less attention is paid to the work of desk-bound academics, and though that makes some of Nicolson’s findings eccentric, it also makes his book a joy to read.

Indeed, one of the book’s most enjoyable aspects is Nicolson’s free speculation about the origin of the poems. He argues that they are ultimately older even than most scholars currently think, and that they preserve a cultural memory of a clash of civilisations around 2000BC: the moment when the nomadic pastoralist Greeks, newly arrived from the Eurasian steppes, collided with a sophisticated, city-bound Mediterranean culture.

This theory may or may not hold up — but there is no doubt that it animates Nicolson’s writing. It is crucial to his sense of Homer’s heroes that, though they are in the grip of a violent world, they retain a deep, painful longing for the idyllic grasslands they left behind.

Besides this, Nicolson has a gift for bringing the driest of archaeological data to life, through the sheer force of his prose. His vivid account of the fringes of the southern steppe left me utterly (if only momentarily) convinced that this was Achilles-country.

The English poet Alexander Pope casts a long shadow over Nicolson’s book. Pope translated both Homeric poems in the first quarter of the 18th-century and made £10,000 from the venture — in real terms probably the most money a human being has ever made from writing poetry.

Pope made his translation attractive to purchasers by creating a Homer fit for the Enlightenment drawing room: decorous and polite. Nicolson, who prizes Homer’s rawness and wildness, is rather contemptuous of Pope, whose heroes seem to belong on a sofa rather than on the steppe.

But willingly or not, Nicolson is a follower of Pope — an inspired amateur who gives us a Homer for the present day. And ours is an age not of politeness but of existential angst. “The Iliad’s subject,” says Nicolson, “is not war or wickedness but a crisis in how to be.” His is a Homer who speaks to a troubled world about what it means to be human.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £20, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT