How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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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. See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down. When old and deeply established institutions or empires grow to the point where their systems start to inhibit them, and their actions become sclerotic and cumbersome, the advantage moves to the agile and impoverished outsiders who can exploit the opportunities that old and elephantine systems cannot use.

The women of Erythrae refused to shave their heads for such a crazed scheme from a poor, blind fisherman, but the non-Greek Thracian women in the city – Thrace is roughly equivalent to Bulgaria today – some of whom were slaves and some now freed, offered up their hair. 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. Thank you to NetGalley, 4th Estate and William Collins and to Adam Nicolson for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.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. The causes of this general catastrophe, which unfolded over some 200 years, reaching a nadir in about 1050 BC, are not known. How to Be: Lessons from the Early Greeks by Adam Nicolson review – ancient wisdom for today’s world—Alex Preston / Guardian-Observer https://bit. 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. 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 Tyre itself, a city of 20,000 inhabitants in 900 BC, where the water was piped to fountains within its walls, they made a 15-acre harbour basin, protected against all winds and raiders, next to a marketplace and with a channel that led to an inner harbour for extra safety. There, we started with the specificity of a single rock pool and zoomed out to a contemplation of meaning against the backdrop of a vast and complex universe; here, we start with the seemingly abstract thinking of a host of wise and ancient minds, then we zoom in to the coins, sherds and amphorae that were the everyday objects of his harbour philosophers.The first beneficiaries of this shift and dispersal of authority were the trading cities on what is now the coast of Israel and Lebanon. The house mouse, originally a near-eastern species, gradually spread west and north in the holds and cargoes of the pioneer traders.

Much of what he finds is now silted, silent, heron-pecked, but Nicolson is alive to the telling detail: the peninsula that allowed for a double harbor; the shallow beach that was once a quay for unloading enslaved people. It was now that the terraces, the identifying mark of Mediterranean ambition and enterprise, were first built on island hillsides. 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.Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on a farm in Sussex. What you find is that once the commercial and trading links are sketched in you are primed for the ideas. Overall this is a good book to understand what was transpiring in the Mediterranean, before the socratic philosophers came into the picture. The author explains things like this because his point is that maritime trade and the cultural mixing of people and goods it implies was the dynamic motor of change.