How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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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. But, reading it today, do we feel also satisfaction, a sense of redress between the free man and the enslaved girl?

If the universe can be seen to have a certain structure, then the self and the city should adopt that structure. Much of what he finds is now silted, silent, heron-pecked, but Nicolson is alive to the telling detail: the peninsula that allowed for a double harbor; the shallow beach that was once a quay for unloading enslaved people.We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. That being said, I have no doubt that people who have a lot of background knowledge on Greek history will enjoy this book. The author succeeded in showing that an open trade and migration across the nations from Italy, all the way to Persia during that period influenced and fertilized the mines of inhabitants and thought leaders in various cities along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. It had somehow come in from elsewhere, and why not from the city of Tyre in the Levant, where the patron god of the city Melqart was merely Hercules by another name? Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and makes the fundamental questions of the ancient philosophers new again.

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 . 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. Often “How to Be” draws on this for its sources and some of its translations, expanding on the older work, thinking through some of its knottier ideas, enriching them with ground data and historical context, along with Nicolson’s own expansive thinking.For the centuries after 3000 BC, the great river-based empires of Egypt on the Nile and Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq had been the power centres of the most civilized and enriched region of the world. 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. 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.

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The attention to place is a moving device, doing for Greek thought what Gilbert Highet’s “ Poets in a Landscape” once did for Latin poetry.