How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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Shaking off the mental domination of priests and god-kings, innovative minds dared to liberate themselves.

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. I think the title suggests a bit more of a self-help book and thus slightly mis-represents this mix of philosophy and history. He shows] the early Greeks developed intellectual habits, chief among them the use of questioning as the basis of knowing, which laid the groundwork for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and for how we reason today. This book will be great for anybody whose reading level does not include Greek and Roman philosophy and classics.If you think the new philosophy is far-fetched, Zeno cautions, don’t imagine that common sense stands up to much scrutiny, either. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. I picked up this book because I have been reading a lot of Greek mythological retellings and have recently visited museums and archeological sites in Cyprus which has fuelled my interest on this topic.

It feels like that chapter was the launchpad for Nicolson’s latest book, How to Be, which is an elevated sort of self-help book about the origins of western philosophical thought. 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.These first Greek thinkers, teaching and writing between about 650 and 450 BC, found their lives on the boundary between the perception of a universal harmony and the daily encounter with the world as it is, in all its difficulty and multiplicity. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. His books include Sissinghurst, God’s Secretaries, When God Spoke English, Wetland, Life in the Somerset Levels, Perch Hill, Restoration, and the acclaimed Gentry. Kudos from this nerd who loves antiquity to this masterful book which was an absolute delight to read and savour. See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down.