Author(s): Adam Nicolson

General

"Adam Nicolson writes popular books as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt…and his excitement is contagious."—James Wood, The New Yorker

Adam Nicolson employs Homeric thinking as the foundation myth to understand the evolution of Greek consciousness and to make the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us today as our own time.

Why Homer Matters is a magical journey of discovery across great stretches of time and place, sewn together by the epic poems themselves and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer’s formulaic were invented after memory and before history to occupy as Adam Nicolson writes "a Third space," in which to bend memory over back thousands of years beyond the customary three generations of human experience.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are among the oldest stories we have, emerging from a time—around 200 B.C.—before the Greeks became Greek, when warlike invaders from the Northern steppe—beyond the Black Sea—clashed with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The poems tell us how we became who we are.