How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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The house mouse, originally a near-eastern species, gradually spread west and north in the holds and cargoes of the pioneer traders.

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.It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.

How To Be tells the immersive and accessible story of Western thought, its origins and its evolution from early Greece; it is an exploration of the sea-and-city world in which, in the Western tradition, the great and everlasting questions of existence were first explored. Nicolson’s father-in-law, John Raven, was a Cambridge classicist who literally wrote the textbook when it comes to the pre-Socratics.

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. Instead of grand bureaucratic dynasties, minor warlords came to control small and parochial territories. Would the Phoenicians, Semitic and Asian as they were, now be recognized as the progenitors of our world? I particularly liked his introductory and concluding chapter as well as his analysis of the Odyssey worldview and the empathetic sophistication of Empedocles' worldview. They could go where they wanted, take what they wanted, sell where they wanted and focus their interest on short-term benefits.

By about 800 BC, the Mediterranean was in touch with itself, a spinning, fractalizing and hybridizing whirlpool of expanding and interacting cultures in which every voyage could be certain of finding a known destination on a distant shore. I happened to be reading the book in Senate House library and so popped round the corner to the British Museum to see one of the relics that Nicolson describes – a golden sheet with instructions for the afterlife inscribed upon it by the Orphic cultists who followed the teachings of Pythagoras. They were essentially east, facing to trade with, learn from, and teach various civilizations that washed off their shore.It is Nicolson’s 25th book in a career spanning 40 years and an array of genres – early in his 60s, he even turned his hand to fiction and was longlisted for the Sunday Times audible short story award. 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. richer and more unusual than [the self-help genre], an exploration of the origins of Western subjectivity. The Mediterranean, a compendium of complementary niches, connected by a sea that extends east and west through similar if ever-varying environments. 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.