How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 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.

For the Greeks, justice was ‘the indicated way’, the way of things that the arrangement of the universe suggests. We can learn from those people who lived many centuries ago and yet who seem to be not so "ancient" after all. 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.As one of the cities that had been founded by the Greeks on the Aegean shores of Ionia in the centuries after 1100 BC it had begun to thrive along with its Greek neighbours on this maritime crossroads. It contains lots of accompanying images, maps and quotes that really enhance the reader’s understanding of the history, philosophy and geography discussed. Written in a flowing and eminently readable style, we are taken on a beguiling and informative journey that looks back at the very foundations of Western philosophy in the context in which it was birthed; despite having read many similar tombs this is the only one that has approached the topic in this manner and from such an original angle. Each chapter starts with a description of a particular harbour city and then gives a neat survey of the key thinker from that city.

This means both historical context — contact and conquest, the founding of settlements across the Mediterranean — but also topographical. A great book to understand these people and these times bringing in the context of today and I am sure as I keep reading I will find more of what the title talks of. He skillfully brings to life this ancient world and shows the „Sitz im Leben“ of the first thinkers about the universe. The Greeks borrowed and fine tuned many current of thoughts that were brought to their shore by the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Lydians, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Indians.Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. How To Be both asks and offers answers to the question as to why an eruption of new thinking happened in this place and at that time, and what Nicolson has written is soaked in the double belief: firstly that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, that philosophy has a geography and that to be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise; and second that, despite that locatedness, and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today. One could imagine its tableau as the leaf-fringed legend on a Grecian urn, its characters fired in red and black: the original absent-minded professor, legs flailing; the enslaved girl pointing in mockery. 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.

If the universe can be seen to have a certain structure, then the self and the city should adopt that structure. But, reading it today, do we feel also satisfaction, a sense of redress between the free man and the enslaved girl? For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. Dip Into NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks.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). Instead of grand bureaucratic dynasties, minor warlords came to control small and parochial territories. The causes of this general catastrophe, which unfolded over some 200 years, reaching a nadir in about 1050 BC, are not known.

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.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. His books include Sissinghurst, God’s Secretaries, When God Spoke English, Wetland, Life in the Somerset Levels, Perch Hill, Restoration, and the acclaimed Gentry. It was now that the terraces, the identifying mark of Mediterranean ambition and enterprise, were first built on island hillsides. Animated by the ambitions of these seaborne remakers of the world, the Mediterranean was driving itself out of the post-Bronze Age slump.