Newspaper Article

Homer as scripture: The power of ancient poetry

Doerries, Bryan

2014

Overview

For centuries, the study of Greek literature has been seen as the province of career academics. But Mr. [Adam 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 have never read the \"Iliad\" or the \"Odyssey,\" or your copies have been collecting dust since college, Mr. Nicolson's book is likely to inspire you to visit or revisit their pages. As Mr. 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,\" Mr. 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.\" For Mr. 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.\"

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Nicolson, Adam