Starting with Homer's Odyssey and moving on through Empedocles, he shows how Greek thinkers asked questions as they tried to make sense of the nature of the world and human life within it. I picked up this book because I have been reading a lot of Greek mythological retellings and have recently visited museums and archeological sites in Cyprus which has fuelled my interest on this topic. It may simply have been that the administrative and political systems of the empires had become etiquette-bound, rigidified and overloaded, unable to keep up with the demands and challenges of imperial rule. But, reading it today, do we feel also satisfaction, a sense of redress between the free man and the enslaved girl? To the philosophical mix, Nicolson has added another ingredient: the poetry of the “ Odyssey” and of Sappho of Lesbos.

If you think the new philosophy is far-fetched, Zeno cautions, don’t imagine that common sense stands up to much scrutiny, either. To imagine large geopolitical change as human experience is difficult, partly because it occurs on a far from personal scale and over time spans that stretch beyond the individual life.There, we started with the specificity of a single rock pool and zoomed out to a contemplation of meaning against the backdrop of a vast and complex universe; here, we start with the seemingly abstract thinking of a host of wise and ancient minds, then we zoom in to the coins, sherds and amphorae that were the everyday objects of his harbour philosophers. Often “How to Be” draws on this for its sources and some of its translations, expanding on the older work, thinking through some of its knottier ideas, enriching them with ground data and historical context, along with Nicolson’s own expansive thinking. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on a farm in Sussex. Unlike the armies of the great river empires, these maritime nomads had no need to attend to centralized control.

I can only rave how Nicolson opens up a whole new view of the Greek exploration by pointing out how early navigation worked. No dialogue, no setting out of opposing views and no multilayering of perspectives is ever encountered. While the setting is very cinematic in certain parts and does indeed set up an amazing narrative structure to understanding what transpired in the Mediterranean world after the fall of the original empires, the book takes a lot of tangents towards understanding the geography polity and trade structures of the cities where pre-socratic philosophers first started preaching, and loses the track of describing the core tenets of that philosophers ideas. With many vicissitudes, the river empires persisted until about 1300 BC, when for reasons that remain opaque the long-fixed pattern of power started to fray and erode. From about 900 BC onwards, the Greeks began to insinuate themselves into this Phoenician network, trading to what is now the coast of Syria and to the Italian peninsula (leaving their ceramics as evidence), where the Etruscans were also playing their part in a vortex of change and rivalry.At some point, at the height of Phoenician success and expansion, before the Greeks had begun their own wide-scale Mediterranean career, perhaps in about 900 BC, a statue of Hercules, whose origins as a demi-god were partly in Greece, partly in the Near East, set out on a wooden raft from the port of Tyre in the land of the Phoenicians.

Dip Into NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. How to Be is structured to make its didactic purpose clear: Nicolson wants to bring these ancient thinkers into the present moment, to make a radical claim for their contemporary relevance. They could go where they wanted, take what they wanted, sell where they wanted and focus their interest on short-term benefits. How to Be teaches many lessons, but most of all that we should savor the strange and stimulating legacy of this lesser-known era. Thank you to NetGalley, 4th Estate and William Collins and to Adam Nicolson for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.So these passages, even from the ancient philosophers, seem too much like a chore; are pretty boring and honestly who cares? 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.

Interesting exploration of the earliest Greek philosophers who have shaped much of our modern thought, Nicolson uses geography as well as history and literature to bring the ideas of early philosophers to light, arguing that they share a sort of harbor mind (linking land and sea). The warrior-kings at Mycenae in mainland Greece were first the acolytes and then imitators of the Cretans, and after about 1450 BC their conquerors.Describing tiny coins, or beautiful vases, supported by illustrations, conveys the everyday day life of the ancient Greeks. Maybe it wasn't supposed to, but the human mind responds better to stories than to disarticulated facts. This means both historical context — contact and conquest, the founding of settlements across the Mediterranean — but also topographical. The narrative visits several important spots, including Miletus - the birthplace of the first theorists of the physical world; Ephesus - the home of Heraclitus, the first person to consider the interrelatedness of things; the twin cities of Notion and Colophon - the country of Xenophanes, the first philosopher of civility; and Lesbos - the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. Except by the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise started from, the tortoise will have moved to a new spot; and when Achilles reaches that point, the tortoise will be still farther ahead, and so on ad absurdum.