NICOLSON, A., — Why Homer Matters.

Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2014. XII,297,(8)p. ills.(B&W as well as full colour photographs and line drawings). Hard bound with pictorial dust wrappers. 'Here is a book on Homer that has been reviewed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Slate, and the Guardian, among others, but not, as far as I know, in any classical journal. Yet it is an important book for classical scholars to read - not because it offers anything both new and true about Homer, but because it shows an educated, widely experienced person creating deeply felt meaning out of Homer and some strands of Homeric scholarship. Nicolson belongs in the tradition of great amateurs of Homer: Keats, Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, or T. E. Lawrence. His book shows what Homer can do. (...) Nicolson’s Homer is not an Iron Age bard making poems about the Mycenaean Late Bronze Age, but a Late Helladic Homer composing an Iliad based on an even earlier age of chaos (…). He wants us to believe that at the heart of the Iliad lies a time before the Hellenes were in Greece, remembered in the generations immediately after their arrival (…). Why pay attention to this book? Because it demonstrates the power of a great text to stabilize and order a life. In mid-life Nicolson began to use Homer, and especially the Iliad, to make meaning out of his experiences. He was lucky. He had read Homer in Greek at school (8), but that teaching (…) had to lie fallow until he rediscovered the Odyssey and Iliad, this time in translation. From that point he began to see Homer as ‘a guide to life, even as a kind of scripture’. This is not only a book about Homer, but also a study of Homeric reception and a complex act of receiving Homer. It can remind those entrusted with teaching the Iliad and Odyssey that they hold in their hands texts that are powerful, ‘horrifying and beautiful, repulsive and attractive’. Nicolson’s book may confront some classicists with an alien sensibility, so that reading it requires constant translation and negotiation. In an age of academic trigger warnings, though, it is worth trying to understand that to a person whose life has been threatened at knifepoint, discovering a book like the Iliad may be better than avoiding all mention of knives.’ (LEE T. PEARCY in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015.11.09).