“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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Two medical instruments recovered from the 15th-century tomb of a Chinese surgeon carry traces of an anaesthetic compound, the earliest chemical evidence ever found of doctors attempting to reduce the pain of a medical procedure.

The surgical scissors and tweezers were unearthed in 1974 from the tomb of a famous doctor named Xia Quan who lived from 1348 to 1411, in Jiangsu province.

at Northwest University in Xi’an, China, and his colleagues used lasers to study the composition of residues on the instruments, revealing traces of aconitine. This compound is produced by plants of the Aconitum genus, commonly known as wolfsbane and monkshood. They are frequently listed as ingredients in ancient Chinese medicinal prescriptions.

Aconitine interacts with sodium channels in the cell membranes of neurons. At the right dose, it has an anaesthetic effect, but it is highly toxic and is rarely used today due to the risks of poisoning.

The residues are concentrated on the blades of the scissors and the tips of the tweezers, making it unlikely the presence of aconitine was due to contamination, the researchers say.

at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved in the research, says there’s no doubt that this is the earliest direct evidence of the use of anaesthetics.

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The research suggests that early surgeons knew more about reducing pain than they have previously been given credit for, he says. “Now we can understand why this surgery may have been present or may have been so prolific and actually manageable in the past,” Matheson says.

Historical texts indicate that Ming dynasty practitioners had developed methods to mitigate the toxicity of aconitine, such as “preparation with boys’ urine, soaking in a black soybean decoction, vinegar-boiling, detoxifying with mung beans and removing the outer skin of the aconite tuber”, Zhao and his colleagues write.

Isolating the aconitine from such a toxic plant and then working out how to apply it without causing harm to the patient would have required a “tremendous amount of science”, says Matheson.

“They have to be able to get it out of the plant without harming themselves,” he says. “Then they need to process it so it can be applied to whatever they’re going to need it for, without killing themselves or hurting people. Then they have to make sure that it actually works.”