How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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When the raft arrived off the coast of Ionia, it bumped ashore on a headland exactly halfway between the harbour of the Erythraeans and its great rival the Greek island city of Chios. There, we started with the specificity of a single rock pool and zoomed out to a contemplation of meaning against the backdrop of a vast and complex universe; here, we start with the seemingly abstract thinking of a host of wise and ancient minds, then we zoom in to the coins, sherds and amphorae that were the everyday objects of his harbour philosophers. That being said, I have no doubt that people who have a lot of background knowledge on Greek history will enjoy this book.

This book transports the reader to the birth of philosophy 2,500 years ago in the Mediterranean's bustling harbor cities. Nicolson who obviously sailed and surveyed the Mediterrenean seas and the adjacent landscape for many years, introduces the emergence of Greek thinking as a result of their connection with the sea and the establishment of trade and trade routes along the sea: the mindset of merchants, settled in harbours (Nicolson coins it the harbour mind), sailing their ships to accumulate money and knowledge is the driving force behind a new way of thinking. Nicolson's prose captures the locations, periods and events in meticulous detail transporting us to another time- obviously assisted by his love of sailing and navigating the seas ,the sense of travelling the trade routes and observing the landscape and architecture is palpable. I became immersed in learning details about Sappho, whose poetry I've been adoring, and who is described as a beautiful, sensitive woman with incomparable artistry of words (examples of her poems are included, with explanation). Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums 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. Whether he is writing about literature, history, the natural world or, as in this latest and exhilarating study of the philosophers of the ancient world, he challenges preconceptions and invites us to join him in changing the lens about who we are and why we behave and think the way we do. It is a story of the margins, the product of deep political and cultural changes in the eastern Mediterranean between about 1200 and 800 BC. I must say, as a philosophy enthusiast it's a joy to have the early-Greek thinkers set against the political and geographical context of the times illustrating what the cultural zeitgeist around them was like at the time to produce such schools of thought.

Maybe it wasn't supposed to, but the human mind responds better to stories than to disarticulated facts. To imagine large geopolitical change as human experience is difficult, partly because it occurs on a far from personal scale and over time spans that stretch beyond the individual life. Having never formally studied classics and only read philosophy at A-level I found this book to be an accessible way to further my understanding.

Nicholson shows how ideas evolved and were articulated for the first time in recorded human history by various ancient Greek philosophers, dramatists, and poets—and how those ideas still influence us to this day.

Nicolson’s father-in-law, John Raven, was a Cambridge classicist who literally wrote the textbook when it comes to the pre-Socratics.Phormion the fisherman recovered his sight and a marvellous temple was erected to enshrine their prize. The ancient Greeks were just so much more interesting, open and thoughtful than the Christians have been for centuries. As with his 2019 book about a year in the lives of the Romantic poets, The Making of Poetry, this chapter about Heraclitus showed Nicolson at his illuminating, energetic best – scholarly without being schoolbookish, aware of the role that brilliant minds, well harnessed, can play in enlarging and enriching our appreciation of life. It was now that the terraces, the identifying mark of Mediterranean ambition and enterprise, were first built on island hillsides.

Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors.There seems little doubt that there was a statue of Hercules in Erythrae, one that was not to be recognized as particularly Greek. 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. Sparkling with maps, photographs and artwork, How to Be is a journey into the origins of Western thought. The description of this book as an attempt at describing the evolution of western thinking and civilization does disservice to the accuracy of the historic events and turmoil described clearly in this fantastic book. With many vicissitudes, the river empires persisted until about 1300 BC, when for reasons that remain opaque the long-fixed pattern of power started to fray and erode.