How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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Would the Phoenicians, Semitic and Asian as they were, now be recognized as the progenitors of our world? It takes your breath away’ Laura Beatty, bestselling author of Lost Property --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. This dazzling passage of writing argued that engagement with the environment is always a philosophical act, and that the close looking of the naturalist is more similar than we might think to the work of the philosopher. The women of Erythrae refused to shave their heads for such a crazed scheme from a poor, blind fisherman, but the non-Greek Thracian women in the city – Thrace is roughly equivalent to Bulgaria today – some of whom were slaves and some now freed, offered up their hair. I constantly needed to look up the definition of words as I was reading, which made this reading experience a bit cumbersome.

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. For the centuries after 3000 BC, the great river-based empires of Egypt on the Nile and Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq had been the power centres of the most civilized and enriched region of the world. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. Unlike the armies of the great river empires, these maritime nomads had no need to attend to centralized control. These harbour cities were better incubators of creative and critical thinking than were the big land-locked capitals.See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down. The thousands of texts that survive from them, as the Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim said, are ‘stereotyped, self-centered, and repetitious’. They were essentially east, facing to trade with, learn from, and teach various civilizations that washed off their shore. Nicolson, the author of “ Life Between the Tides” (2022) and “ Why Homer Matters” (2014), travels the ruins of the coastal towns — Miletus, Ephesus, Samos, Elea — where Western philosophy began.

There's a lot of books about Ancient Greece but there's so few about Ancient Greek culture and this one was a treat.Phormion the fisherman recovered his sight and a marvellous temple was erected to enshrine their prize. The author explains things like this because his point is that maritime trade and the cultural mixing of people and goods it implies was the dynamic motor of change. This book transports the reader to the birth of philosophy 2,500 years ago in the Mediterranean's bustling harbor cities.

The Mediterranean, a compendium of complementary niches, connected by a sea that extends east and west through similar if ever-varying environments. It feels like that chapter was the launchpad for Nicolson’s latest book, How to Be, which is an elevated sort of self-help book about the origins of western philosophical thought. Hercules floats from the great Phoenician city of Tyre to a point halfway between the young Greek settlements of Chios and Erythrae in Ionia. The author succeeded in showing that an open trade and migration across the nations from Italy, all the way to Persia during that period influenced and fertilized the mines of inhabitants and thought leaders in various cities along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean.A great introduction to Greek thought and an interesting thesis as to how harbour cities may have influenced the evolution of these philosophies. 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.