Why Homer still matters today

Where does Homer come from? And why does Homer matter? These ancient poems can be daunting and difficult, but I have no doubt that their account of war and suffering can still speak to us of the role of destiny in life, of cruelty, humanity, its frailty and the pains of existence.

That they do is a mystery. Why is it that something conceived in the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age, maybe 4,000 years ago, as foreign as the Dayak, as distant as Vanuatu, can still exert its grip on us? How can we be so intimate with something so far away?

Perhaps it is a mistake to give the answer before the questions are properly asked, but this is complicated country, and an idea of the destination is worth having. Besides, it is a Homeric technique to tell the story before it begins. And so, if you ask why and how the Homeric poems emerged when they did, and why and how Homer can mean so much now, the answer to both questions is the same: because Homer tells us how we became who we are.

That is not the usual modern answer. The current orthodoxy is that The Iliad and The Odyssey are both products of the eighth century BC, or thereabouts, early Iron Age Greece, a time that has been called the Greek Renaissance. In the preceding half-millennium, Greek civilisation had largely sunk into isolated pockets of poverty. Many of the islands in the Aegean were deserted. One or two had remained rich and kept up links with the Near East, but the great palaces of an earlier Greece had fallen into ruin. But for reasons that have yet to be explained, the eighth century saw a widespread revival.

The population of Greece and the islands began to grow. The tempo of life quickened. The art of making bronze, dependent on imported tin, was revived for the first time in four centuries. Colonies, trade, improved ships, gymnasiums, coinage, temples, cities, pan-Hellenic competitions at Olympia (the first, traditionally, in 776 BC), the art of writing, of depicting the human figure on pottery and in the round, the first written law codes, the dating of history, the first tentative moves towards the formation of city-states: every one of these aspects of a renewed civilisation quite suddenly appeared all over the eighth-century Aegean.

Homer, in this view, was the product of a new, dynamic, politically inventive and culturally burgeoning moment in Greek history. Homer was the poet of a boom.

I see it differently: my Homer is a 1,000 years older. His power and poetry derive not from the situation of a few emergent states in the eighth-century Aegean, but from a far bigger and more fundamental historic moment, in the centuries around 2000 BC, when early Greek civilisation crystallised from the fusion of two very different worlds: the semi-nomadic, hero-based culture of the Eurasian steppes to the north and west of the Black Sea, and the sophisticated, authoritarian and literate cities and palaces of the eastern Mediterranean.

Greekness—and eventually Europeanness—emerged from the meeting and melding of those worlds. Homer is the trace of that encounter—in war, despair and eventual reconciliation at Troy in The Iliad, in flexibility and mutual absorption in The Odyssey.

Homer’s urgency comes from the pain associated with that clash of worlds and his immediacy from the eternal principles at stake: what 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?

The idea I have pursued is that the Homeric poems are legends shaped around the arrival of a people—the people who through this very process would grow to be the Greeks—in what became their Mediterranean homeland. The poems are the myths of the origin of Greek consciousness, not as a perfect but as a complex, uneasy thing.

As a civilisation, what emerged in Greece was distinct from both the northern steppelands of the Bronze Age and the autocratic bureaucracies of the Near East, and fused qualities of both. Homer is a foundation myth, not of man nor of the natural world, but of the way of thinking by which the Greeks defined themselves, the frame of mind which made them who they were, one which, in many ways, we have inherited. The troubled world described by Homer remains strangely familiar.

This is an extract taken from Adam Nicolson's The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters, published by William Collins.

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