If you ever wanted a Homeric jump-start, this is your book

As a teenager, like many of his class and generation, Adam Nicolson encountered Homer in Greek lessons. The subject matter seemed remote and uninteresting — ‘like someone else’s lunchtime account of a dream from the night before’ — and the words dead on the page — ‘as if the poems were written in maths’. But when Nicolson took Robert Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey with him on a sailing trip up the west coast of Ireland ten years ago, something drastically different sparked.

He came to see Homer ‘as a guide to life, even as a kind of scripture’. The Mighty Dead is, if you like, the resultant work of evangelism: a thrillingly energised book that travels to the real-life locations of the action (the likely site of Hades does not disappoint); that marvels at the deadly leaflike beauty of bronze-age spearheads; that sketches the history of manuscript transmission; that delves into the language of the verse and shows how, at the molecular level, it transmits a whole worldview at once decipherable and dramatically strange. Above all, it searchingly describes Nicolson’s personal encounter with the verse. To read Homer, properly attuned, is to be struck by what Nicolson calls ‘time-vertigo’ — and this book is one that holds your hand and encourages you to peer over the edge.

There’s a very good Homer-for-beginners account here. You get the 19th-century question over whether Homer was one man or several well summarised, for instance. Nicolson does a nice, clear job, too, of explaining how the hexameters work; and hence, exactly why so many Homeric epithets — designed to plug in interchangeably — scan identically. He slightly skates over the difference between Greek (quantitative) and English (stress-based) prosody, but his concern is to draw attention to the orality of the verse.

He gives a vivid sketch of the work of the great Homer scholar Milman Parry and those of his successors who found Yugoslavian storytellers in the 1930s spieling semi-improvisational epics in just the way Homer is thought to have done.