How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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The question "how to be" is perhaps the most essential question humans have been trying to answer since our conscious existence on Earth 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. I’d like to put you on the spot now and do something unfair. If all of these philosophers but one had to be erased from the historical record, which one would you leave us? This is a pretty rotten question—

Each chapter is explored through a key question: Does love rule the universe? How can I be true to myself?... culminating in The invention of Understanding and raises broader questions that can also help us to consider what we can learn and recognise in 2023 from these ancestors and their legacy .Familiar names such as Homer, Odysseus, Pythagoras are explored and their impact on the evolution of philosophical thinking. Prize-winning writer Adam Nicolson travels through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Sparkling with maps, photographs and artwork, How to Be is a journey into the origins of Western thought. Each chapter is meticulously researched and the abundance of cultural references and knowledge truly highlights the wisdom and knowledge of the Greek. The maps and photographs of artefacts deepen the readers connection to each essay/chapter and understanding of the period . Adam Nicolson has produced an impressively knowledgable and accessible read to explore Ancient Greece and help us dig deeper into a time of philosophical development that is still has its impact on us today. 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). I enjoyed reading about Homer, Odysseus, and Zeno; as a matter of fact, I enjoyed reading about all the philosophers. And the details! Describing tiny coins, or beautiful vases, supported by illustrations, conveys the everyday day life of the ancient Greeks. But it's not just the artifacts that teach us about their owners. Adam Nicolson talks about social relations, at some point emphasizing slavery and explaining its impact.She may have known it, all right! I do talk in the book about Heraclitus and Zoroaster, and there are obvious Eastern connections to be understood, ones between the Aegean shores of Turkey and deeper Persia. I would love one day to write a book about it. The whole Greek phenomenon is always portrayed as a sort of ‘miracle,’ you know; it’s just as possible to portray it as the Western face of Asia. It’s actually Asia emerging into the Mediterranean world. However, it is interesting about Phoenicia and some other places. Phoenicia did not have this revolution in thought. There were mercantile, oligarchic city-states trading from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, entirely connected and dependent, like Phoenicia was, but apparently there was no Phoenician philosophy, no Phoenician lyric poetry. So, I do think the Greeks were unique.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun . . . [ How to Be] is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived.” —Alex Preston, The Observer Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 2,500 years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums of life.Nicolson's own gaze is deeply attentive . . . He weaves . . . a vivid picture that puts flesh on shadowy bones. He has infused his quest for wisdom with a sense of poetry." —Noonie Minogue, The Tablet (UK) In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. 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. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson, the award-winning author of Why Homer Matters, uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradox in southern Italy with Zeno, the world’s first absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus, burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes. This brief history is the soil in which the seed of early philosophy began to grow: the fraying of ancient, imperial control; the eruption of an unregulated stimulus in the sea-based freebooters; the development by them of trading networks which ran the length of the Mediterranean; and, as a product of those networks, the growth of merchant cities, first among the Phoenicians and then, after about 800 when Phoenician autonomy began to shrink under renewed pressure from the neo-Babylonian empire to the east, the emergence of the Greek cities into their own years of potency.