How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

by Adam Nicolson

Overview

Nicolson crafts a geography of the ancient world and a brilliant exploration of our connections to the past.

What is the nature of things?
What is justice? How can I be myself?
How should we treat each other?

Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the conundrums of life.

These great innovators shaped the beginnings of western philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus, in Ephesus, was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. On the Aegean island of Lesbos, the early lyric poets Sappho and Alcaeus asked themselves, “How can I be true to myself?” On Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy, where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms.

The award-winning writer Adam Nicolson travels with us through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Enhanced with maps, photographs, and artwork, How to Be is an expedition into early ideas. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and makes the fundamental questions of the ancient philosophers new again. What are the principles of the physical world? How can we be good in it? And why do we continue to ask these questions? It is an enthralling, exhilarating journey.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374610104
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	26,792
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Adam Nicolson is the author of many distinguished books on history, landscape, and great literature. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize. His books include Life Between the Tides and Why Homer Matters. He lives on a farm in Sussex, England.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/03/2023

Historian 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. Drawing on archaeology, literary accounts, and his own travels, Nicolson contends that Greek philosophers’ focus on fluidity, exchange, and connectedness derived from the growth of Iron Age port cities across the Aegean. In support of this idea, he recounts a well-worn parable of the philosopher Thales, who lived in the port city of Miletus in the 6th century BCE; Thales tripped into a well while examining the stars and was laughed at by an enslaved girl who chided him for not being able to see what was directly in front of him. According to Nicolson, this story illustrates how the tensions of the slave trade, the basis of Miletus’s coastal prosperity, led to the origins of philosophy’s self-conscious divide between the study of an ideal cosmos and an unideal reality. Elsewhere, Nicolson posits that the poet Sappho was inspired by the long absences of a maritime world to develop the idea of a distinct, isolated self that longs for connection. (“And her light/ stretches equally/ over salt sea...// But she goes back and forth remembering.”) Lyrical and insightful, this graceful analysis is an alluring must-read. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2023-08-10
A dazzling meditation on the quest of the early Greek philosophers to understand the world.

Most readers have heard of the most famous Greek philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Socrates—but Nicolson, author of Life Between the Tides and Why Homer Matters, goes back further in time to examine the Iron Age philosophers: Sappho, Thales, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus, among others. His premise is that the Greeks of this era, from roughly 700 to 500 B.C., developed their agile way of looking at the world from their seaborne way of living and trading. The author calls it the “dolphin mind,” an attitude that rejected the authoritarianism of the past in favor of a “mindset of entrepreneurial, adventuring people…a form of mercantile courage, of reliance on fluidity.” Author of many award-winning books on literature, nature, sailing, history, Nicolson is an excellent writer, his work shot through with wonder, erudition, and curiosity. He effortlessly pulls together strands of history, philosophy, language, art, culture, and archaeology. He chronicles his travels to present-day sites and ruins of the cities these philosophers called home, from Turkey’s western coast to Sicily, and re-creates both everyday city living and the philosophers’ struggles to understand the gears in the machine of existence. He organizes chapters around existential questions—What Is Existence Made Of? Is the World Full of Souls? Does Love Rule the Universe?—and the text is accompanied by reproductions of Greek art and artifacts, including pottery, coins, statues, and entire temples. These are all tangible clues to how these philosophers worked, played, and thought. Nicolson acknowledges the brutal side of Greek life, and he doesn’t shy away from the ugly realities of slave life, from endless, backbreaking manual labor to forced prostitution. Much deeper than a self-help book, this work returns to the past and shows how the ancients’ struggles were in many respects our own.

A must-read for anyone interested in philosophy, history, travel, art and the quest of human beings to comprehend themselves.

Kirkus Reviews

"Wise, elegant . . . richer and more unusual than [the self-help genre], an exploration of the origins of Western subjectivity." —Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post

"This eminently readable tour of Greek philosophy from approximately 650 to 450 B.C. brings the “sea-and-city world” of Heraclitus and Homer to life . . . [He shows] the early Greeks developed intellectual habits, chief among them the use of questioning as the basis of knowing, which laid the groundwork for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and for how we reason today." —The New Yorker

“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

"[Nicolson's] exploration of the period is wonderfully rich . . . How to Be teaches many lessons, but most of all that we should savor the strange and stimulating legacy of this lesser-known era." —Timothy Farrington, The Wall Street Journal

"A dazzling meditation on the quest of the early Greek philosophers to understand the world . . . Nicolson is an excellent writer, his work shot through with wonder, erudition, and curiosity. He effortlessly pulls together strands of history, philosophy, language, art, culture, and archaeology . . . Much deeper than a self-help book, this work returns to the past and shows how the ancients’ struggles were in many respects our own." —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"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 . . . Lyrical and insightful, this graceful analysis is an alluring must-read." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Seductive . . . A poetic tour of philosophical thought." —Thomas W. Hodgkinson, The Spectator

"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)

From the Publisher

Scintillating poetry from Sappho and examinations of Pythagoras's and Homer's lives and ideas are just some of the material that makes up this fascinating audiobook. Narrator Leighton Pugh introduces the literature, art, and thinking of these and other early Greeks. He connects their lives and theories with those of some of our Western thinkers whose own philosophies are rooted in these very same theories. Pugh's clear, articulate English-accented voice ties together the author's explanations of several Greek hypotheses and makes them clear and understandable, even to the unfamiliar. Pugh captures the drama of the principals' lives and the power of their words and ideas. Listeners who want an enjoyable journey through early Greek philosophy and literature will find this performance inspiring and accessible. E.E.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

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