How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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In this book Nicolson takes an in depth look at both the physical and metaphysical lives of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. It examines how the development of harbour cities from 1200BC cultivated numerous great minds; it provides insight with facts and archeological discoveries whilst also exploring larger philosophical concerns from key thinkers of the era that are still relevant today. The move from divine power to human capacity was one of the most vital shifts of consciousness, emerging as it did from a sense of an autonomous self, apart from the grip of gods or kings. It gave us philosophy, essentially. And yet, the hopefully-not-apocryphal story of Thales and the enslaved girl is a kind of delicious cautionary tale, bumping up against the possibility of a philosopher’s self-importance. [From the book: “While [Thales] was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a well; and it is said that a beautiful and witty Thracian slave girl laughed at him because he was so keen to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there behind him, right at his feet.”] In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the belief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces us to our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson, the award-winning author of Why Homer Matters, uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradox in southern Italy with Zeno, the world’s first absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus, burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes. Nicolson ( The Life Between the Tides) illuminates in this meditative account the vital influence geography had on the evolution of Greek philosophy from the 11th to the 5th centuries BCE, arguing that places gave rise to frames of mind that served as wellsprings of new ideas . . . Lyrical and insightful, this graceful analysis is an alluring must-read." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Different forms of a palace economy ruled this core of the Bronze Age world. In Anatolia, the Hittite empire played its part as one of these near-eastern power blocs. In Crete, the palace-temples of the Minoans drew on Egyptian and Mesopotamian models, commanding a sea-based empire stretching up into the Aegean and west towards Italy. The warrior-kings at Mycenae in mainland Greece were first the acolytes and then imitators of the Cretans, and after about 1450 BC their conquerors. 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. Hercules floats from the great Phoenician city of Tyre to a point halfway between the young Greek settlements of Chios and Erythrae in Ionia.

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You take your reader through these seminal philosophers chronologically and show the influence of their environments, the actual geography of the places, upon them. You talk about “the fluid world” and “the harbor mind” and take great pains to articulate these sensibilities via a Bronze Age-framework of, among other disciplines, science and mysticism, and then how these two begin to converge and blend in the Iron Age.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun . . . [ How to Be] is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived.” —Alex Preston, The Observer Prize-winning writer Adam Nicolson travels through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Sparkling with maps, photographs and artwork, How to Be is a journey into the origins of Western thought. In How to Be, Nicolson continues his imaginative engagement with the ancient world, diving deeper into the lives of the pre-Socratic philosophers – some of whom you may know: Pythagoras, Heraclitus (“You can’t step into the same river twice”) and Zeno. Others have been more or less forgotten: Anaximenes, Xenophanes and Archilochus. All of these thinkers, Nicolson argues, are linked not only by their common place in space and time – between around 800 and 450BC in Megale Hellas (Greater Greece) – but also by the fact that they shared what he calls a “harbour mind”.

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Each chapter is explored through a key question: Does love rule the universe? How can I be true to myself?... culminating in The invention of Understanding and raises broader questions that can also help us to consider what we can learn and recognise in 2023 from these ancestors and their legacy .Familiar names such as Homer, Odysseus, Pythagoras are explored and their impact on the evolution of philosophical thinking. Kudos from this nerd who loves antiquity to this masterful book which was an absolute delight to read and savour. The women of Erythrae refused to shave their heads for such a crazed scheme from a poor, blind fisherman, but the non-Greek Thracian women in the city – Thrace is roughly equivalent to Bulgaria today – some of whom were slaves and some now freed, offered up their hair. A rope was made and with it the men towed the statue home. Phormion the fisherman recovered his sight and a marvellous temple was erected to enshrine their prize. Hercules became the half-human deity of Erythrae (as of many other places in the Mediterranean), but no women except Thracians were allowed within his sanctuary. Statue and temple were still there more than a thousand years later, in the second century AD, when the image of the god was described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’ by Pausanias, who was also shown the hair rope, still kept as a holy relic. I’m thinking of the Indian philosophical concept of Indra’s Net, that essential network of connection between all things, with sparks of divinity inside all. Your audience member seems to have been a Zen Buddhist without knowing it! Also, I think the book title confused me. The purpose of the book isn't to offer life lessons from the early Greeks. It's a history of Western philosophy. In other words, it's a history book, not a philosophy book.