How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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Adam Nicolson's book with the same title takes us into the world of ancient Greeks and shines a new light on the famous philosophers, thinkers, and ordinary citizens of those distant lands. I particularly liked his introductory and concluding chapter as well as his analysis of the Odyssey worldview and the empathetic sophistication of Empedocles' worldview. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Here we encounter Pythagoras — charismatic, hucksterish, a cult leader with a repertoire of miracles and an aversion to beans — and Parmenides, for whom the evidence of our senses obscures the unchanging timelessness of reality.

It outlined the first emergence 2,500 years ago of the instinct that understanding was not simply to be learned from priests or elders, or experts, or by imagining a congeries of terrifying metaphysical monsters, but could be gathered by each of us applying the worrying and thinking mind to the conundrums of life.The atmosphere was in its way not unlike those of the giant quasi-autocracies of the twentieth century and of China now. That said there were dark sides as well to the Grecian way of life, such as slavery and Nicolson does not shy away from including those. We can learn from those people who lived many centuries ago and yet who seem to be not so "ancient" after all. Adam Nicolson has produced an impressively knowledgable and accessible read to explore Ancient Greece and help us dig deeper into a time of philosophical development that is still has its impact on us today.

Where the rest of Europe and most of western Asia remained divided into low-tech, small-scale chiefdoms, these sophisticated literate empires looked as if they could last for eternity.Starting with Homer's Odyssey and moving on through Empedocles, he shows how Greek thinkers asked questions as they tried to make sense of the nature of the world and human life within it. In an indirect way one of the effects for me has been to reinforce the fallacy of the Christian myths. Fat with the nutrients their alluvial valleys could give them, cities, palaces, temples, writing, literature, sculpture, historical records, libraries, accounting systems, mathematics and astronomy had all been developed to serve the purposes of an overwhelming divine and regal authority.

I’ll let Socrates tell the story: The philosopher Thales “was studying the stars and looking upward, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was before him at his very feet. There are no long lectures as every explanation is conveyed through artefacts, quotations, or a historical incidents that are interesting in themselves, but also help construct knowledge in bite-sized chunks. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks.

Unlike the armies of the great river empires, these maritime nomads had no need to attend to centralized control. Vast authoritarian structures, both physical and administrative, had been established by which the dominion of priests and kings ruled for generation after generation. A gigantic stone head from Old Smyrna, perhaps the kind of statue Pausanias saw in Erythrae and described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’. No dialogue, no setting out of opposing views and no multilayering of perspectives is ever encountered.

Kudos from this nerd who loves antiquity to this masterful book which was an absolute delight to read and savour. So these passages, even from the ancient philosophers, seem too much like a chore; are pretty boring and honestly who cares?The idea of the harbour mind is a brilliant one and convincingly joins together disparate thinkers with vastly differing approaches to the great questions of life. It was a delightful discovery while browsing the offerings of netgalley and I just loved all those little gems of insight Nicolson accumulated and put into a vision which painted a very vivid picture of the origins of the way Western thinking emerged. How To Be both asks and offers answers to the question as to why an eruption of new thinking happened in this place and at that time, and what Nicolson has written is soaked in the double belief: firstly that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, that philosophy has a geography and that to be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise; and second that, despite that locatedness, and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today. The thousands of texts that survive from them, as the Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim said, are ‘stereotyped, self-centered, and repetitious’. A microcosm of the interaction between the Greek merchant harbour cities and the world in which they found themselves can be heard in a traditional story told by the second-century AD Greek traveller Pausanias about the harbour city of Erythrae, now on the coast of Turkey, out to the west of Izmir.