Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey: a Biography

A tale of two timeless epics

Alberto Manguel
Atlantic Books, 304pp, £12.99,

Tom Holland

Wednesday, 7th November 2007

Tom Holland

This is frustrating, because just as there is much in this book that seems not to relate very profoundly to Homer at all, so also is there much that has been left out. The influence of the Iliad and the Odyssey, while largely literary, to be sure, has not always been exclusively so. Back in ancient times, Homer was regarded by the Greeks as so infinite, so inexhaustible, so utterly the wellspring of their profoundest presumptions and ideals, that only the Ocean, which encompassed and watered all the world, was felt to represent him adequately. Manguel’s biography belongs to a series entitled ‘Books that Shook the World’; and it would have been fitting, given such a slogan, to have had some reflections on how Homer served to shape the entire course of classical civilisation. What role, for instance, might the Iliad have had in steeling the Spartans to make their stand at Thermopylae? What influence might the Odyssey have had in encouraging that inveterate curiosity about alien cultures that the Greeks, more than any other ancient people, so consistently displayed? Above all, in a book that finds room in its index for Jansenism and the danse macabre, why no mention of Alexander? For surely, if ever there was a book that shook the world, then it was the copy of the Iliad that the great Macedonian carried with him to the very limits of the horizon, and always slept with under his pillow?

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

How to write a wrong

Allan Massie

‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’

The power of the evasive word

Michael Howard

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.