The Mighty Dead is an immense journey of history and discovery through the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and their emergence from the much older Bronze Age – a world of migration and strife – when the nomadic tribes of the northern steppes clashed with the sophisticated cities of the eastern Mediterranean These stories tell us how we became who we are. In Nicholson’s exhilarating study he explores the true power of the Homeric epics, in their evocations of love and appalling violence side by side, whose unwavering subject ‘is not elegance, but truth however terrible