What is the nature of things? Must I think my own way through the
world? What is justice? How can I be me? How should we treat each
other? 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. 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. Prize-winning 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. 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. Born out of a rough, dynamic—and often
cruel— moment in human history, it was the dawn of enquiry, where
these fundamental questions about self, city and cosmos, asked for
the first time, became, as they remain, the unlikely bedrock of
understanding.
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