“You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you.” So writes Adam Nicolson in , his paean to that indispensable pair of ancient epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Christopher Nolan’s of the latter makes Nicolson’s book essential reading now for anyone interested in the story’s greater significance.

Nicolson’s work follows three trains of thought. In the first, he waxes philosophical about what Homer – always referred to in the singular, but acknowledged to have been multiple people, spanning generations – has to say about the meaning of life and the clash between civilisation and depravity. He delves into the fascination literary giants have had with Homer, including John Keats, whose poem Endymion gives the book its title, and Alexander Pope, whose translations leave much to be desired.

The other two strands are more rooted in the tangible world. Nicolson digs into the text of the Iliad and the Odyssey and parses out variations in the Greek, tracing the language’s structure back to the Linear B of the Mycenaean era and beyond, and uses this linguistic examination to attempt to pin down exactly when the poems were first composed – much earlier than we’d previously thought, he argues. The standardised, written Homer that we know came down from a much older oral tradition, says Nicolson, as far back as even 2000-1800 BC.

Finally, he finds traces of Homer’s writing in archaeological treasures from around the ancient Mediterranean, from a papyrus found at the Hawara site in Egypt to a pottery shard discovered in a tomb on the island of Ischia, one of the oldest surviving examples of written Greek. The papyrus dates to about AD 150; the pottery, to the 8th century BC. Much attention is also paid to the shaft graves of Mycenae, and what they can tell us about the world before the Bronze Age collapse.

Nicolson isn’t interested in the historicity of the poems themselves – they are myths, after all – as much as he is in the world that produced them. He draws a compelling portrait of a complex ancient realm, and of people for whom these stories provided a link to their nomadic, warrior-centred past.

Rereading The Mighty Dead, with its focus on relics and remnants, reminded me of my honeymoon to Crete. My husband and I visited the archaeological museum in Heraklion and saw a boar-tusk helmet on display; in book 10 of the Iliad, you will find Odysseus described wearing one, too. It is a reminder, as Nicolson’s book impressively contends, that the world of Homer is still very much all around us, if we know where to look.

Who were the enigmatic Sea Peoples blamed for the Bronze Age collapse?

Around 3000 years ago, several empires and kingdoms in the Mediterranean collapsed, with a group of sea-faring warriors implicated as the culprit. But new evidence shows that many of our ideas about this turbulent time need completely rethinking

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Togetherness
Rowan Hooper
(, UK, out 4th June; , US, out 18th August)

The best books are those that give you a new perspective, but  by my colleague Rowan Hooper has given me something more than that – not just a new view, but a new way of seeing. In essence a book about symbiosis, Togetherness zooms from the inner workings of our cells all the way out to how our planet functions as a whole and back in again, revealing how biological cooperation underpins all life – and why Western science has largely failed to notice this for centuries.

Symbiosis is the kind of concept you learn at school, often with a too-neat-to-be-true definition and a few quirky illustrative examples – coral, say, or lichen. Both feature in Togetherness (plus plenty of extraordinary cases you won’t be familiar with), but Rowan makes it abundantly clear that symbiosis isn’t a freak occurrence confined to a few classic cases: it’s a rule of nature, occurring time and time again and everywhere you care to look.

How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun

Having demonstrated this, he then makes his passionate argument for how this revelation requires us to re-examine everything we know about the natural world. He traces our understanding of evolution through history, and how Charles Darwin’s dazzling fundamental insights on competition and survival have an overlooked counterpart in the tendency of unrelated living things to come together. Rowan – as big a fan of Darwin as I’ve ever met – treads the line carefully and shows how you can have both.

In the thrilling final third of the book, Rowan explores all the environmental ills of today, many of which are the result of us neglecting to consider how different species live and work together. He speaks to the scientists trying to figure out how, in turn, we could use symbiosis to right these wrongs.

I’ve worked closely with Rowan, 91av’s podcast editor, for over a decade, so I can’t pretend that this is an objective review of his third book. But listeners of our podcast The World, The Universe And Us will know that Rowan is someone who loves to dive into big ideas, and Togetherness manages to be both hugely ambitious in scope and also very enjoyable.

His plea for us all to adopt an ecological world view, one underpinned by the insights of symbiosis, is deeply rooted in his earlier career as a scientist, but Rowan’s many journalistic titbits – from what Karl Marx thought of Darwin to Carl Sagan’s opening chat-up line to Lynn Margulis – make it really fun.

Spirit of Antarctica expedition cruise

Join Rowan Hooper on a journey into one of the most remote and pristine environments on Earth guided by a team of seasoned experts, from naturalists to historians, who will share their knowledge of this extraordinary region.

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