If you were to read only one recent book on Homer and his works it would unquestionably be The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson (5th Baron Carnock). Although he can stray occasionally into unnecessary personal tales (do we really need to know about his being raped while in Crete?) he is absolutely on the money about the importance of Homer as he peels back the layers of time that reveal the deep roots not only of the Myceneans but also of their distant and dimly seen ancestors.

He starts with the troubled question of Homer’s identity. One Homer, many Homer’s no Homer? (And, by the way, it’s actually Homeeros which, in the dialect on the island of Lesbos, means blind). If there were multiples then what is the nature of the two great epics – are they masterpieces put together by editors? Not very likely, but then that’s what the King James Bible is.

Enter Milman Parry (1902-1935) and his assistant Albert Lord. Parry did his Masters on Homer at Berkeley and then went to the Sorbonne to do his doctorate (again, on Homer). His thesis went like this: there was a Homer but he probably never wrote anything down, he memorized it all. He could do this because

1. He was working within an oral tradition of poetry that went way back and

2. He used many oft-repeated phrases (like “the wine-dark sea” or “the much-suffering, godlike Odysseus”).

Nicolson’s image is Homer standing on top of a pyramid of all the bards that preceded him and perfected these phrases. Parry, of course, had to prove his theory was even possible. Could anyone hold that much in their memory? He travelled to the Balkans because he had heard that there were people there who, while playing the one-stringed gusle, could sing a story that could last for days, sixteen thousand lines of verse. When they were asked to repeat the story it was identical to the first version. He found the same talent on Crete .Others found it all over the world.

In 1953 on the island of Lewis in Scotland, Duncan Macdonald, the hereditary bard of Clan Macdonald, told an audience a seven thousand word long story. He had told it 3 years earlier and both versions were transcribed. The stories were identical. Duncan had learned it from his father and the family tradition went back until at least 1817. They also learned about the bard Angus MacMillan who could tell numerous stories, some running to 58,00 words. That’s the length of the Odyssey.

So if Homer existed, and the case was much stronger after Parry’s work, then the two epics were orally composed and only written down later, and the oral composition was based on material the went way back before Homer. In fact some of the Greek grammatical structures that Homer uses pre-date the Linear B tablets – 1400 B.C.E.

This means that through Homer we have a limited access to the world of the south-east European steppes over4,000 years ago. In Nicolson’s words:

"The Iliad’s subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how tobe. Do you, like Agamemnon, attempt to dominate your world? Do you, like Odysseus, manipulate it? Do you, like Hector, think of your family above all and weaken your resolve by doing that? Or do you, like Achilles, believe in the dignity of love and the purity of honour, as the only things that matter in the face of death? These questions are urgent for Homer because the arrival of a steppe culture at the gates of a city make them urgent. There is more to the Achilles story than this: in the course of the poem he suffers, grows, loses himself in the violence of grief, and finally comes to a new and deeper understanding, but in this great speech of steppe-land consciousness, Homer has bequeathed to us the first unforgiving idealist of our civilization". p. 152

       On the northwest coast of the Black Sea, near Odessa, there is tumulus-style cemetery containing the remains of herders and horseback pastoralists from around 3000 B.C.E. Like the Mycenaean’s, the dead were laid in their tombs wearing death-masks, in this case made of unfired clay, coloured with ochre or ash, but modeled to look like the dead face. These people, or certainly people like them, may have been the ancestors of the besiegers of Troy.

See below:

       I’ll leave the rest to the reader, but if you are a “fan” of Homer, or looking for insight into the world of the Mycenaeans, then this book is for you.