Nicolson's own gaze is deeply attentive . . . He weaves . . . a vivid picture that puts flesh on shadowy bones. He has infused his quest for wisdom with a sense of poetry." —Noonie Minogue, The Tablet (UK) Hugely formative ideas emerged in these harbour-cities: fluidity of mind, the search for coherence, a need for the just city, a recognition of the mutability of things, a belief in the reality of the ideal — all became the Greeks’ legacy to the world. She may have known it, all right! I do talk in the book about Heraclitus and Zoroaster, and there are obvious Eastern connections to be understood, ones between the Aegean shores of Turkey and deeper Persia. I would love one day to write a book about it. The whole Greek phenomenon is always portrayed as a sort of ‘miracle,’ you know; it’s just as possible to portray it as the Western face of Asia. It’s actually Asia emerging into the Mediterranean world. However, it is interesting about Phoenicia and some other places. Phoenicia did not have this revolution in thought. There were mercantile, oligarchic city-states trading from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, entirely connected and dependent, like Phoenicia was, but apparently there was no Phoenician philosophy, no Phoenician lyric poetry. So, I do think the Greeks were unique.

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. When the raft arrived off the coast of Ionia, it bumped ashore on a headland exactly halfway between the harbour of the Erythraeans and its great rival the Greek island city of Chios. This book transports the reader to the birth of philosophy 2,500 years ago in the Mediterranean's bustling harbor cities. Shaking off the mental domination of priests and god-kings, innovative minds dared to liberate themselves. Thinkers like Homer, Sappho, and Pythagoras offered new insights on the physical world, morality, and the process of human inquiry. As the authority of the empires began to fall apart, fleets of sailing ships from the north, filled with crews of freebooters, raiders-cum-traders, with Greeks among them and often equipped with a new kind of European slashing sword, began to roam the eastern Mediterranean, terrorizing its inhabitants. In Crete the populations of hundreds of villages deserted their seaside locations and built high, hidden refuges up in the hills. In Egypt, a pharaonic inscription records the bafflement of the authorities when faced with these new and unpredictable enemies: Kudos from this nerd who loves antiquity to this masterful book which was an absolute delight to read and savour.

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Nicolson's prose captures the locations, periods and events in meticulous detail transporting us to another time- obviously assisted by his love of sailing and navigating the seas ,the sense of travelling the trade routes and observing the landscape and architecture is palpable. The heavy-featured Hercules, fat-lipped, boxer-nosed, brutal-browed, wearing on his head the mane and pelt of the lion he had strangled to death at Nemea in the Peloponnese, came to embody the spirit of this port city, with its acropolis high over the harbour, its cornlands and olive groves stretching into the shallow valleys of the hinterland, and with a scatter of low, sheltering islands across the sea between it and Chios. It is the head that would appear forever stamped on Erythrae’s silver coins. These are tangled beginnings, more a meshwork than a network, one lattice of interactivity laid over another in a rösti of connectedness, but a pattern can be made out within them: the Greeks would draw on the ancient, inherited learning of Egypt and Mesopotamia; set it in the frame of an adventurous and disruptive approach to life; and then look for a third term, neither wedded to autocratic power nor merely interested in a piratical free-for-all, but seeking what might be called the inventively civic, forms of life and understanding that depended neither on arbitrary authority nor on anarchic violence but were forever in search of the middle ground of social and personal justice, looking for, if perhaps never quite finding, the shared understanding of the three connected realms of soul, city and cosmos that would come to define them. Each chapter is meticulously researched and the abundance of cultural references and knowledge truly highlights the wisdom and knowledge of the Greek. The maps and photographs of artefacts deepen the readers connection to each essay/chapter and understanding of the period . Adam Nicolson has produced an impressively knowledgable and accessible read to explore Ancient Greece and help us dig deeper into a time of philosophical development that is still has its impact on us today. The move from divine power to human capacity was one of the most vital shifts of consciousness, emerging as it did from a sense of an autonomous self, apart from the grip of gods or kings. It gave us philosophy, essentially. And yet, the hopefully-not-apocryphal story of Thales and the enslaved girl is a kind of delicious cautionary tale, bumping up against the possibility of a philosopher’s self-importance. [From the book: “While [Thales] was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a well; and it is said that a beautiful and witty Thracian slave girl laughed at him because he was so keen to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there behind him, right at his feet.”]

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun . . . [ How to Be] is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived.” —Alex Preston, The ObserverI’d like to put you on the spot now and do something unfair. If all of these philosophers but one had to be erased from the historical record, which one would you leave us? This is a pretty rotten question— The coins of Erythrae showed on one side Hercules wearing his lion pelt and on the reverse his club, quiver and bow. Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 2,500 years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums of life. 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.

These great innovators shaped the beginnings of western philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus, in Ephesus, was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. On the Aegean island of Lesbos, the early lyric poets Sappho and Alcaeus asked themselves, “How can I be true to myself?” On Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy, where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Prize-winning and bestselling writer Adam Nicolson travels through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Sparkling with maps, photographs and artwork, How to Be is a journey into the origins of Western thought.

Some 2,900 years ago the two were merely rivals in a contested sea. Citizens from both urgently wanted to bring home the enormous Hercules. For a while neither succeeded, until a fisherman from Erythrae called Phormion, who had lost his sight through disease, had a vision in a dream: the women of Erythrae must cut off their hair and weave a rope with it, and by using it the men of the city would be able to tow Hercules into their harbour. 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. Animated by the ambitions of these seaborne remakers of the world, the Mediterranean was driving itself out of the post-Bronze Age slump. The population of the sea as a whole had reached about 20 million by 800 BC, and was still growing. It was now that the terraces, the identifying mark of Mediterranean ambition and enterprise, were first built on island hillsides. Vines and then cuttings from olive trees were exported from one end of the sea to the other. The house mouse, originally a near-eastern species, gradually spread west and north in the holds and cargoes of the pioneer traders. By about 800 BC, the Mediterranean was in touch with itself, a spinning, fractalizing and hybridizing whirlpool of expanding and interacting cultures in which every voyage could be certain of finding a known destination on a distant shore. It strikes me that this merging of the scientific mind with the mystical mind produced the concept of justice, the idea that between what evidently is and what might be, metaphysically, is what ought to be, what’s right and due to people. It begins to flower in Ionia about this time. A gigantic stone head from Old Smyrna, perhaps the kind of statue Pausanias saw in Erythrae and described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’. It was the end of the Bronze Age. The causes of this general catastrophe, which unfolded over some 200 years, reaching a nadir in about 1050 BC, are not known. There is no sign of any great climatic change. 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.

In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. 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. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson, the award-winning author of Why Homer Matters, uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradox in southern Italy with Zeno, the world’s first absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus, burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes. In this book Nicolson takes an in depth look at both the physical and metaphysical lives of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. It examines how the development of harbour cities from 1200BC cultivated numerous great minds; it provides insight with facts and archeological discoveries whilst also exploring larger philosophical concerns from key thinkers of the era that are still relevant today. Each chapter is explored through a key question: Does love rule the universe? How can I be true to myself?... culminating in The invention of Understanding and raises broader questions that can also help us to consider what we can learn and recognise in 2023 from these ancestors and their legacy .Familiar names such as Homer, Odysseus, Pythagoras are explored and their impact on the evolution of philosophical thinking. This book offers a sweeping view of the birth of Western philosophy. For me, it was too much. I never got a good sense of what the book was about. It's a ton of information. It's good information, and it's interesting. It just didn't feel coherent to me. It didn't seem to be telling a story. Maybe it wasn't supposed to, but the human mind responds better to stories than to disarticulated facts. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Yes, I know! Nobody really understands Parmenides, including me. Have you ever tried to read him? Exceptionally difficult. I mean, I rather love him, his journey down to the house of death to visit the great goddess Persephone. Wonderful stuff. And Pythagoras’s claims for the unitary existence of the self as well as the invention of the individual soul, undoubtedly one of the most formative ideas in the history of humanity. Pythagoras becomes a rare thing, an actual philosopher-king, a philosopher-king of Kroton there in southern Italy. Nicolson ( The Life Between the Tides) illuminates in this meditative account the vital influence geography had on the evolution of Greek philosophy from the 11th to the 5th centuries BCE, arguing that places gave rise to frames of mind that served as wellsprings of new ideas . . . Lyrical and insightful, this graceful analysis is an alluring must-read." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) The Bronze Age ended, say, around 1100 BCE with this extraordinary collapse of the great empires in Mesopotamia and Eastern Turkey, the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, that world of rigid hierarchies and palace-based cultures. Their essential movement was centripetal, dragging people and resources towards the grand monarchical center. This was both a model of life on earth and of the cosmos. A central god-king dominated culture, and it all collapsed for whatever reason. We really don’t know why. Then, the Dark Ages, although historians don’t like that term anymore. Writing, metalwork, even those great palaces disappear, and a wild, bandit-world emerges. In time, nascent city-states—not on the modern-day Greek mainland but largely on the Aegean shores of modern-day Turkey—develop and you have the emergence of a particular isolated, self-sufficient mercantile power center without a dominating monarchy. This book takes the reader on an epic journey through the origins of Western thinking. It was a delightful discovery while browsing the offerings of netgalley and I just loved all those little gems of insight Nicolson accumulated and put into a vision which painted a very vivid picture of the origins of the way Western thinking emerged. 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. And we cannot think of ourselves as epiphenomena, bubbles on the surface of a much larger stream. But the sources of philosophy were not merely brilliant individuals nor chance happenings. It can be seen in retrospect to have emerged from the intersection of three culture-worlds in the eastern Mediterranean about 3,000 years ago. The meeting of the western limits of Asia, the northern shore of Africa in Egypt and the braided and tasselled fringe of southern Europe gave rise to what we now see as the beginnings of western thought.