SING IN ME, MUSE

Homer is the seventh life in the Ancient Civilisations series. Sing in me, Muse. The singer does not matter. The singing matters. But the singer is the condition of the singing. Both things are true.

No one knows who Homer was. He may have been one man or a tradition of many. He may have lived in Smyrna, or Chios, or half a dozen other cities that claimed him after his death. The ancient world remembered him as blind, yet could not agree on anything else.

Out of this uncertainty, the Iliad and the Odyssey survive: two poems that founded Western literature and have never been equalled for scope, precision, or the sheer physical reality of the world they conjure. Someone made the radical decision to open a poem about the Trojan War not with the war itself, but with the anger of one man. Someone gave the enemy commander, Hector, a wife and a son and made him sympathetic. Someone gave Penelope a cunning equal to her husband's, and forged a god-made shield that contained, in bronze, the whole of human life.

This novel does not pretend to solve the Homeric Question. It states the uncertainty plainly, before inhabiting the most plausible reconstruction scholarship allows: an old, blind oral poet on the Ionian coast, performing and composing simultaneously, holding two epic poems entire in a memory shaped by the absence of sight. It follows him from the formal tradition he inherited, through the festival performances where the Iliad and the Odyssey took their first shape before a live audience, to old age, and to the long afterlife of the poems: copied, written down, scattered across the Mediterranean, printed in 1488, translated and retranslated into every language that has wanted to call itself literate.

A novel about the most influential poet who may never have existed as a single person, as well as about the unmistakable, specific artistic intelligence that the poems prove was there regardless.

Sing in Me, Muse is the seventh novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.