How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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They could go where they wanted, take what they wanted, sell where they wanted and focus their interest on short-term benefits. I particularly liked his introductory and concluding chapter as well as his analysis of the Odyssey worldview and the empathetic sophistication of Empedocles' worldview. They were literate, adopting and developing the alphabet that in the eighth century the Greeks would borrow and adapt from them in their turn, but the Phoenicians left nearly no record of themselves: no poetry, no epic tales, no literature, no history, no drama, no philosophy. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password.

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. Nicholson shows how ideas evolved and were articulated for the first time in recorded human history by various ancient Greek philosophers, dramatists, and poets—and how those ideas still influence us to this day. In Crete, the palace-temples of the Minoans drew on Egyptian and Mesopotamian models, commanding a sea-based empire stretching up into the Aegean and west towards Italy. Their reach was long, and by about 900 BC the whole of the Mediterranean was starting to become a single maritime space.A gigantic stone head from Old Smyrna, perhaps the kind of statue Pausanias saw in Erythrae and described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’. A Phoenician hoard deposited then and recently dug out of the river muds at Huelva in the Gulf of Cadiz contained a helmet from Mesopotamia, swords from Ireland and Atlantic France, African ivory and ostrich shell, brooches from the eastern Mediterranean and pottery in patterns that originated in Tyre and Sidon but made of local Spanish clay.

Thinkers like Homer, Sappho, and Pythagoras offered new insights on the physical world, morality, and the process of human inquiry. Full of wit, warmth and wisdom, this is a worthwhile addition to the library of anyone looking to contextualise early thinking, those at the forefront of Ancient Greek philosophy and their respective ideas. It was now that the terraces, the identifying mark of Mediterranean ambition and enterprise, were first built on island hillsides.These harbour cities were better incubators of creative and critical thinking than were the big land-locked capitals. 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. Nicolson’s father-in-law, John Raven, was a Cambridge classicist who literally wrote the textbook when it comes to the pre-Socratics. Nothing about the new way of thinking came from centrality or long-instituted authority; every one of its qualities derived from conditions found on the edges of power, where fusion, manoeuvrability, thievery, deceit, eclecticism and openness were aspects of a vitalized, at times anxious and often predatory life.