How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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How to Be is structured to make its didactic purpose clear: Nicolson wants to bring these ancient thinkers into the present moment, to make a radical claim for their contemporary relevance. It was now that the terraces, the identifying mark of Mediterranean ambition and enterprise, were first built on island hillsides. The meeting of the western limits of Asia, the northern shore of Africa in Egypt and the braided and tasselled fringe of southern Europe gave rise to what we now see as the beginnings of western thought. The coins of Erythrae showed on one side Hercules wearing his lion pelt and on the reverse his club, quiver and bow. It contains lots of accompanying images, maps and quotes that really enhance the reader’s understanding of the history, philosophy and geography discussed.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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.This is time-travel and mind-travel and wow-travel and perhaps above all soul-travel of the sort that stretches, nurtures and exhilarates. Nicolson, the author of “ Life Between the Tides” (2022) and “ Why Homer Matters” (2014), travels the ruins of the coastal towns — Miletus, Ephesus, Samos, Elea — where Western philosophy began. 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.

Each chapter starts with a description of a particular harbour city and then gives a neat survey of the key thinker from that city.If the universe can be seen to have a certain structure, then the self and the city should adopt that structure.

Instead of grand bureaucratic dynasties, minor warlords came to control small and parochial territories. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives at Sissinghust Castle in Kent. 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.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. As Adam Nicolson’s wise, elegant new book observes, philosophy’s origin myth is more than mere pastoral slapstick: Quietly, discreetly, it depicts a world divided into “those who were enslaved and attended to the actual, and those who owned enslaved people who could attend to the high-minded. 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.

Almost without exception, this civilization was concentrated in great capital cities, hived around a royal or priestly ideology and arranged in rigid hierarchies. 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 may simply have been that the administrative and political systems of the empires had become etiquette-bound, rigidified and overloaded, unable to keep up with the demands and challenges of imperial rule.