How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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The Mediterranean, a compendium of complementary niches, connected by a sea that extends east and west through similar if ever-varying environments.

One of the great things about this book is the historical progression through the decades before Christianity. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and makes the fundamental questions of the ancient philosophers new again.It is the phenomenon that emerges at the end of empire, whether in post-Roman Europe, the post-Ottoman Balkans or post-Soviet Asia. The maps and photographs of artefacts deepen the readers connection to each essay/chapter and understanding of the period . In this book Nicolson takes an in depth look at both the physical and metaphysical lives of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. Kudos from this nerd who loves antiquity to this masterful book which was an absolute delight to read and savour. 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.

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. Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters.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. When old and deeply established institutions or empires grow to the point where their systems start to inhibit them, and their actions become sclerotic and cumbersome, the advantage moves to the agile and impoverished outsiders who can exploit the opportunities that old and elephantine systems cannot use.

Travelling from Greece to Turkey to Italy, to Egypt and beyond, the individuals he describes are sexy, funny, shocking, beautiful, flawed and above all real.We look with Nicolson at the guiding star of The Great Bear, we walk up with him from the harbour to the acropolis of Old Smyrna, descent under an old church crypt into the pottery lane of ancient times … and from this visceral experiences Nicholson lets us take flight to connect with those early explorers, the mapmakers of times long ago to understand the very makings of Western thinking and its uniqueness. If the texts in which they recorded their thoughts had not disappeared, would this book have been about them? Here is a superb one from the Getty, covering the rise of the first cities around 3500 BC, through the em.