One of the contentions of English philosopher Gillian Rose was that the three necessary attitudes for the good life are 1) intellectual eros—the vigorous desire to be curious, to admit that in the end you don’t know something; 2) attention—the ability to concentrate and examine objectively; and 3) acceptance— accepting humbly that there may be no solutions. If you think of this on a social level, she says, desire and concentration creates a kind of sociability, a connectedness, which in turn must be about law, about establishing the frame within which a viable social life can work, and then acceptance of the city must generate justice, the notion that singular claims cannot override others. Some of our early thinkers here said we could also look at this at the cosmic level.

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. The authority of the pharaohs began to shrink and Egypt’s Mediterranean presence and command faded. Monument-building came to an end. The Mesopotamian cities went into decline. To the north, in Anatolia, the empire of the Hittites collapsed. On the edges of this palace-world, Mycenaean power in Crete, in mainland Greece and on the Aegean shore of what is now western Turkey splintered and crumbled. Settlements returned to poverty and insignificance. Instead of grand bureaucratic dynasties, minor warlords came to control small and parochial territories. The population of the islands in the Aegean and its peripheries fell by three-quarters. Houses became small, poor and simple, filled with basic equipment. The knowledge of writing and metalwork disappeared from the Greek world. I’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— 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. 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.So, one could have a longing attention to metaphysics which results in a cosmic acceptance that there might, in fact, be no meaning, or that it’s marvelous that there is no meaning, or some kind of meaning. Rose never quite articulated it like that, but in my mind it’s exactly the grid across which these thinkers roam. I haven’t spoken to people about this before, but it’s very prominent in my mind. The open-endedness of these thinkers’ world, no closed boundaries at the sea edge of these cities, allows for a liberated way of living. Perhaps, this is a bit sentimentalist. There was also violent slave trading, something that was ferociously competitive and cruel. I don’t think we need to sentimentalize this. It was no sweet, ideal world.

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. 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.

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) A gigantic stone head from Old Smyrna, perhaps the kind of statue Pausanias saw in Erythrae and described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’. W ise, elegant . . . richer and more unusual than [the self-help genre], an exploration of the origins of Western subjectivity." —Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post 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.

Absolutely fundamental to it is a sense of justice. For the Greeks, justice was ‘the indicated way’, the way of things that the arrangement of the universe suggests. If the universe can be seen to have a certain structure, then the self and the city should adopt that structure. The three realms of self, city and cosmos are the points of a triangle within which a coherent understanding can be found. The unruly Shardana [their identity has never been established] whom no one had ever known how to fight, came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them. What links all Nicolson’s writing, though, is a tireless and tigerish sense of wonder and curiosity; a bounding willingness to immerse himself and his reader deeply in his subject: life… I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a sense of fun. How to Be delivers wholeheartedly on the promise of its vaunting title. It is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived’OBSERVER - 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.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:

I loved how Nicolson lets us visit those early harbours - literally walking us through to the acropolis overlooking the sea - how he introduces the early writers, poets and shows us how their writing is connected to the world of seafaring merchants, e.g. that the Odyssee (and not the Iliad) is the complementing poem to this new, enterprising world. He skillfully brings to life this ancient world and shows the „Sitz im Leben“ of the first thinkers about the universe. Nicolson's] exploration of the period is wonderfully rich . . . How to Be teaches many lessons, but most of all that we should savor the strange and stimulating legacy of this lesser-known era." —Timothy Farrington, The Wall Street Journal

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Kudos from this nerd who loves antiquity to this masterful book which was an absolute delight to read and savour. The first beneficiaries of this shift and dispersal of authority were the trading cities on what is now the coast of Israel and Lebanon. Collectively these people were known to the Greeks as the Phoenicians, meaning the ‘red ones’, perhaps because of the purple-dyed cloth they made and wore. It was a name unknown to themselves, and they were called after the cities from which they came: the men of Tyre, of Sidon, of Byblos. These were the dynamic coastal entrepôts of the years after 1000 BC, providing goods and treasure to the remaining markets to the south and east, intensified by the imperial demands of the newly energized and expansive Assyrian empire, and so developing into multicultural exchange hubs for information, beliefs and goods. I became immersed in learning details about Sappho, whose poetry I've been adoring, and who is described as a beautiful, sensitive woman with incomparable artistry of words (examples of her poems are included, with explanation). I enjoyed reading about Homer, Odysseus, and Zeno; as a matter of fact, I enjoyed reading about all the philosophers. And the details! Describing tiny coins, or beautiful vases, supported by illustrations, conveys the everyday day life of the ancient Greeks. But it's not just the artifacts that teach us about their owners. Adam Nicolson talks about social relations, at some point emphasizing slavery and explaining its impact. I’m thinking of the Indian philosophical concept of Indra’s Net, that essential network of connection between all things, with sparks of divinity inside all. Your audience member seems to have been a Zen Buddhist without knowing it! These great innovators shaped the beginnings of 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. In Lesbos, the Aegean island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the early lyric poets asked themselves 'How can I be true to myself?' In Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms.