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Informationen zum Autor Adam Nicolson Klappentext "Complex, personal, and profound ... a brash and brave piece of writing ... filled with the swords and spears that inflict the carnage of the Iliad ." - The Wall Street Journal Why Homer Matters is a magical journey of discovery across wide stretches of the past, sewn together by the Iliad and the Odyssey and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer's poems-transmitted orally across the generations, shaped and reshaped in a living, self-renewing tradition-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, but emerging at a time around 2000 BC when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis Illustrations xi Map xiii Foreword 1 1 Meeting Homer 7 2 Grasping Homer 13 3 Loving Homer 32 4 Seeking Homer 40 5 Finding Homer 59 6 Homer the Strange 72 7 Homer the Real 100 8 The Metal Hero 116 9 Homer on the Steppes 144 10 The Gang and the City 178 11 Homer's Mirror 205 12 Homer's Odyssey 224 Conclusion: The Bright Wake 244 Notes 247 Bibliography 273 Acknowledgments 283 Index 285