“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

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

Homo sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years. Often, our big brains and intelligence are credited with making us the most successful species to have ever walked on Earth, but that isn’t entirely true. There was another species of human that survived on this very same planet for nearly 2 million years, which was the grandparent of so many other human species, including us. They explored new continents. They mastered tools. They may have controlled fire. And they did it all with a brain barely half the size of ours. Enter Homo erectus, a species that may force us to confront an uncomfortable possibility… that intelligence alone isn’t what makes a species successful.

Read more: How Homo naledi is changing what we know about death