A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 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 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.
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.
