Why Homer Matters

Adam Nicolson

Mar 2015 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by John Lee

About this audiobook

Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek-and our-consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time. Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts." The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea?. These poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.

About the author

Adam Nicolson is the author of the bestselling New York Times Notable Book God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible.

John Lee has read audiobooks in almost every conceivable genre, from Charles Dickens to Patrick O'Brian, and from the very real life of Napoleon to the entirely imagined lives of sorcerers and swashbucklers. An AudioFile Golden Voice narrator, he is the winner of numerous Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards.