Why Homer Matters

September 29, 2014
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.

Starred review from September 15, 2014
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.

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November 1, 2014
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 immediateand as seductiveas 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2014

The Fifth Baron Carnock, grandson of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, Nicolson argues that Homer's verse continues to resonate because it shows us how deeply connected we remain to our ancestors and to worlds seemingly lost. He does so partly by revisiting the many landscapes Homer visited in verse, from once-fragrant Sicily, where oil refineries grind away, to the Balkans, where oral poetry persists, to empty Chernobyl. Evidently, it was not for nothing that Nicolson won the 2009 Ondaatje Prize (for Sissinghurst), awarded for any work successfully evoking the spirit of a place.

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November 1, 2014

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

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