Why Homer Matters

"Complex, personal, and profound ... a brash and brave piece of writing ... filled with the swords and spears that inflict the carnage of the Iliad." -The Wall Street Journal

Why Homer Matters is a magical journey of discovery across wide stretches of the past, sewn together by the Iliad and the Odyssey and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer's poems-transmitted orally across the generations, shaped and reshaped in a living, self-renewing tradition-occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts."

The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 BC when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.

Adam Nicolson's books include the New York Times bestseller God's Secretaries, Sea Room, Sissinghurst, and Seamanship. Among his honors are the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Prize, and the British Topography Prize; he lives on a farm in Sussex with his wife and their five grown children.

Illustrations xi
Map xiii
Foreword 1
1 Meeting Homer 7
2 Grasping Homer 13
3 Loving Homer 32
4 Seeking Homer 40
5 Finding Homer 59
6 Homer the Strange 72
7 Homer the Real 100
8 The Metal Hero 116
9 Homer on the Steppes 144
10 The Gang and the City 178
11 Homer's Mirror 205
12 Homer's Odyssey 224
Conclusion: The Bright Wake 244
Notes 247
Bibliography 273
Acknowledgments 283
Index 285

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