How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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In several of the early thinkers, there is an explicit Phoenician connection, usually a parent, often a journey. Putting my noise-canceling headphones on as the construction work on a nearby building resumed on Monday, I couldn't resist thinking what a great idea it was.

Passionate, poetic, and hauntingly beautiful, Adam Nicolson’s account of the west’s earliest philosophers brings vividly alive the mercantile hustle and bustle of ideas traded and transformed in a web of maritime Greek cities. Would the Phoenicians, Semitic and Asian as they were, now be recognized as the progenitors of our world? The narrative visits several important spots, including Miletus - the birthplace of the first theorists of the physical world; Ephesus - the home of Heraclitus, the first person to consider the interrelatedness of things; the twin cities of Notion and Colophon - the country of Xenophanes, the first philosopher of civility; and Lesbos - the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. If you think the new philosophy is far-fetched, Zeno cautions, don’t imagine that common sense stands up to much scrutiny, either. But, reading it today, do we feel also satisfaction, a sense of redress between the free man and the enslaved girl?richer and more unusual than [the self-help genre], an exploration of the origins of Western subjectivity. I’ll let Socrates tell the story: The philosopher Thales “was studying the stars and looking upward, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was before him at his very feet. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the conundrums of life. Adam Nicolson has written a fascinating book that explores the meaning of To Be Human within the context of Ancient Greece and an emerging world of philosophy that is questioning life in relation to ancient gods and curious creatures and to where man is independently abandoning the dictated ideology and beginning to self reflect on his purpose.

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. They could go where they wanted, take what they wanted, sell where they wanted and focus their interest on short-term benefits. How to Be is structured to make its didactic purpose clear: Nicolson wants to bring these ancient thinkers into the present moment, to make a radical claim for their contemporary relevance. There seems little doubt that there was a statue of Hercules in Erythrae, one that was not to be recognized as particularly Greek.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 an indirect way one of the effects for me has been to reinforce the fallacy of the Christian myths. The ancient Greeks were just so much more interesting, open and thoughtful than the Christians have been for centuries.