In fact, this is a book about the evolution of the Greek centric, thinking, and philosophy in the eastern Mediterranean, and not in the western world, as we know right now centered around Europe. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives at Sissinghust Castle in Kent. They could go where they wanted, take what they wanted, sell where they wanted and focus their interest on short-term benefits.

The effort to pull it all together is impressive and the notes reveal the extend of modern scholarship behind it all.Nicolson who obviously sailed and surveyed the Mediterrenean seas and the adjacent landscape for many years, introduces the emergence of Greek thinking as a result of their connection with the sea and the establishment of trade and trade routes along the sea: the mindset of merchants, settled in harbours (Nicolson coins it the harbour mind), sailing their ships to accumulate money and knowledge is the driving force behind a new way of thinking.

Maybe it wasn't supposed to, but the human mind responds better to stories than to disarticulated facts. 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. To the philosophical mix, Nicolson has added another ingredient: the poetry of the “ Odyssey” and of Sappho of Lesbos. It’s a tale full of opposites: worldly and otherworldly, laughter and seriousness, Earth and the heavens, the sublime and the ridiculous. In several of the early thinkers, there is an explicit Phoenician connection, usually a parent, often a journey.I think the title suggests a bit more of a self-help book and thus slightly mis-represents this mix of philosophy and history. A microcosm of the interaction between the Greek merchant harbour cities and the world in which they found themselves can be heard in a traditional story told by the second-century AD Greek traveller Pausanias about the harbour city of Erythrae, now on the coast of Turkey, out to the west of Izmir. The question "how to be" is perhaps the most essential question humans have been trying to answer since our conscious existence on Earth began.

Leaving Sappho on the island of Lesbos, “How to Be” tacks westward to the settlements of southern Italy and Sicily. 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.How to Be,” then, is an attempt to take the thought of the early Greeks — the motley group of mathematicians, moralists and mystics we know as the pre-Socratics — and to set it in its context. As Adam Nicolson’s wise, elegant new book observes, philosophy’s origin myth is more than mere pastoral slapstick: Quietly, discreetly, it depicts a world divided into “those who were enslaved and attended to the actual, and those who owned enslaved people who could attend to the high-minded.