A Review of “The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters” by Adam Nicolson, Part 1
The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters is an example of that non-fiction genre so reviled by the anti-White establishment: books that celebrate the European past and the rich and world-transforming culture that emerged from it. Foundational to this culture are the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which have long been pillars of the Western literary canon. While their place in intellectual life of the West has waned over the last century (casualties of the generalized decline of a now Jewish-dominated culture), they remain as alive as ever for many readers. For author Adam Nicolson, in addition to their imperishable literary value, the Homeric epics should matter to all Europeans because through them “Homer tells us how we became who we are.”[i]
Nicolson is an English writer and journalist known for his scholarly but passionately expressed works on history, landscape and literature. The grandson of noted (and controversial) writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, he recalls being taught Homer at school, where his fumbling knowledge of Greek meant “it was as if the poems were written in maths.” Today most schoolchildren are unlikely to get even that far — with the majority doubtless associating Homer with The Simpsons and its derisive Jewish caricature of the White American father. Nicolson “rediscovered” Homer in middle age when he found himself electrified by the American poet Robert Fagles’ acclaimed verse translation of the Odyssey.
In The Mighty Dead Nicolson argues that the mainstream historical account of Homer is wrong. The current orthodoxy has the Iliad and the Odyssey as products of the early Iron Age Greece of the eighth century BC, or thereabouts. This was a time, often labelled the Greek Renaissance, when Greek civilization, after five centuries of decline and stagnation, saw a revival that culminated in the golden age of classical Athens in the fifth century BC. This rebirth, yet to be fully explained, coincided with a population boom and the rediscovery of bronze-making, a skill that had fallen into disuse in the preceding four centuries. This was a time in Greek history that saw the growth of
colonies, trade, improved ships, gymnasiums, coinage, temples, cities, pan-Hellenic competitions at Olympia (the first, traditionally, in 776 BC), the art of writing, of depicting the human figure on pottery and in the round, the first written law codes, the dating of history. The first tentative moves towards the formation of city-states: every one of these aspects of a renewed civilization quite suddenly appeared all over the eighth-century Aegean. Homer, in this view, was the product of a new, dynamic, politically inventive and culturally burgeoning moment in Greek history. Homer was the poet of a boom.[ii]
