THE RELEVANCE OF HOMER

Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters (New York: Henry Holt, 2014) ([M]y Homer is a thousand 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 civilization crystallized 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 places 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?" Id. at 2. Also see Bryan Dowries, "Songs of the Sirens," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/28/2014.)