The painting glorifies all the antiquated theories that held that Homer was a blind, illiterate genius poet who singlehandedly created two of the greatest stories in human history, the Odyssey and the Iliad. I think I needed Homer to be relieved of the dictionary, to be remade as a story told aloud by the light of a flickering flame. “Homer is a foundation myth, not a man nor of the natural world, but of the way of thinking by which the Greeks defined themselves, the frame of mind which made them who they were,” Nicolson wrote in his recently published book, “Why Homer Matters.” 
 
 In an interview with the Washington Post, Nicolson compared Homer to a Viking ship. The epics as we have them are derived, via a long oral tradition, from the cultures of perhaps 2000BC, he believes. In fact, there’s an academic field of inquiry that examines everything involving Homer called the “Homeric Question.” Homer has puzzled just about every scholar who has studied him for the simple reason that there isn’t much to study. Like Adam Nicolson, I had read it in Greek when young, teasing out the sense like "picking bones from fish", a lovely image that the author of the Odyssey – but not the Iliad – might have used. They're simply the evolved beauty of long and careful tradition. Or was there in each case a succession of poets, or a syndicate of poets and redactors?” 
 
 But the reasoning that supports Nicolson’s theory is different from most. My claim is that the poems, especially The Iliad, have their beginnings around 2000 B.C.—about 1,000 or 1,200 years earlier than most people say Homer existed. Numerous aspects of the Homeric works are shared across the European continent and into parts of India, Nicolson said, and have nothing to do with either Greece or the Aegean region. “Outside Troy is this camp of wild barbarians — the Greeks,” he told National Geographic. 
 
 A marble bust of the Greek poet Homer in a 2008 exhibition. … All ideas of rule and law and love count for nothing. The only thing that makes sense is revenge and self-assertion. And that picture of the Greeks doesn’t make sense any later than about 1800 to 1700 B.C.” 
 
 So if the epic poems derived from a much earlier period than others have thought, where does that leave us? “… A century or more after the poems came into existence.” 
 
 Nicolson, however, says the time gap between when the poems first materialized and when that parchment emerged was actually significantly wider. Nicolson had had a Keatsian moment of revelation that the Odyssey was telling him "the unaffected truth … speaking about fate and the human condition in ways that other people only seem to approach obliquely". But they're just fragments, not the whole Iliad. It appears the question, even centuries after its birth, yet lives. And yet no one ever says there needed to be some great maker behind it. This manliness is about being capable, a survivor who moves restlessly through the world, evading or embracing the "terror-allure" of women; troublingly, however, it is also about enacting appalling violence. Keats knows Homer only through Pope's translation – which seemed then, as it does now, to pretty-up the raw rough power of the epics in a frill of politeness (despite Pope's insight that Homer's verses "pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it"). The word Homer uses for her means her prime quality is her wise governance—that she knows how to organize things and maintain the state for 20 years while Odysseus is away. Around him, paying homage, are some of the greats of Western art and literature, including the Greek epic poet Pindar (in white, holding a lyre) and Sophocles (proffering a scroll). Nicolson has written a beautiful study: full of insight, generosity and unaffected passion. How did writing this book change your life?
– When we think of The Iliad and The Odyssey, we shouldn't give credit to a single man, says a historian: "It's a mistake to think of Homer as a person," historian Adam Nicolson tells National Geographic. "Homer is an 'it.' A tradition. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it," adds the author of Why Homer Matters. Modern readers want to know the story of individual writers, but "Homer has no biography," Nicolson says. He also argues that the works may have emerged some 1,200 years before many historians say Homer lived; he dates the epic poems to around 2000 BC. He supports his theory by noting that parts of Homeric stories "are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories." What's more, Greece, in The Iliad, is full of "barbarians," and that description "doesn't make sense any later than about 1800 to 1700 BC." The works combine the "hero-based culture of the Eurasian steppes" with the "sophisticated, authoritarian, and literate cities and palaces of the eastern Mediterranean," Nicolson writes, as Guardian reviewer Charlotte Higgins notes. Meanwhile, the Washington Post observes that questions over Homer's existence, or lack thereof, aren't new; no "reliable historical information" exists about the poet, Terrence McCoy writes. (Shakespeare, of course, is another writer whose identity has been questioned; some have said he wasn't alone in his work.)