How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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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. A Phoenician hoard deposited then and recently dug out of the river muds at Huelva in the Gulf of Cadiz contained a helmet from Mesopotamia, swords from Ireland and Atlantic France, African ivory and ostrich shell, brooches from the eastern Mediterranean and pottery in patterns that originated in Tyre and Sidon but made of local Spanish clay.

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The Phoenicians in many ways were the proto-Greeks – rich, adventurous, enterprising, living on the edges of the great Egyptian and Mesopotamian inheritances, aggressive, urban, ruled by nominal doge-like kings but with the real power resting with the merchant oligarchy in city councils. It is illustrated with dozens of photographs of Greek artefacts in museums and brings a whole new layer of depth and understanding to our engagement with these ancient objects. 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.

Leaving Sappho on the island of Lesbos, “How to Be” tacks westward to the settlements of southern Italy and Sicily. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. Each chapter starts with a description of a particular harbour city and then gives a neat survey of the key thinker from that city. In an indirect way one of the effects for me has been to reinforce the fallacy of the Christian myths.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. 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.

Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. 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. There are passages of description of ancient sites, what they looked like, how the citizens lived in the Aegean, the Ionian Sea pre 300BC. The kind of critical thinking in the East Greek islands was full of movement and transformation; but when the Persian empire dominated the region and the Greeks migrated to Italy and Sicily the thinking solidified and focused more on enduring states beyond movement and change. The heavy-featured Hercules, fat-lipped, boxer-nosed, brutal-browed, wearing on his head the mane and pelt of the lion he had strangled to death at Nemea in the Peloponnese, came to embody the spirit of this port city, with its acropolis high over the harbour, its cornlands and olive groves stretching into the shallow valleys of the hinterland, and with a scatter of low, sheltering islands across the sea between it and Chios.We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. How to Be,” then, is an attempt to take the thought of the early Greeks — the motley group of mathematicians, moralists and mystics we know as the pre-Socratics — and to set it in its context. Nicolson’s father-in-law, John Raven, was a Cambridge classicist who literally wrote the textbook when it comes to the pre-Socratics.

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 thousands of texts that survive from them, as the Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim said, are ‘stereotyped, self-centered, and repetitious’. They could go where they wanted, take what they wanted, sell where they wanted and focus their interest on short-term benefits.Adam Nicolson talks about social relations, at some point emphasizing slavery and explaining its impact.