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On the “wine-dark” Aegean seas of Homer’s Odyssey, the merchants of Tyre and Sidon, of Byblos and Carthage, put out from their home ports—busy hives of activity crammed with merchants from all over the ancient world—in order to, like free-flowing dolphins, traverse the waterways of the Mediterranean. This ease of connection was not only beneficial for commerce, but, as Adam Nicolson shows us in his stunning new book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, for the disciplines of common sense and wisdom collectively known, in time, as philosophy. Nicolson, author of such brilliant histories as God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible and The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels, has an unfailing way of pulling one more deeply into his subject matter in a fashion never coerced or strained, but always gently, creatively, passionately. How to Be is no exception. Pulling away from a deep academic dive into the complexities of the early Greek philosophers, he chooses instead to place their lives and ideas into the context of their individual Mediterranean geographies, moving from the east of Ionia over the centuries to the west of Italy’s Calabria. In so doing, he extracts not only the especialness of these men and their varied understandings of the world’s workings, but demonstrates how these perceptions were influenced, in part created, by the rocks, islands, inlets, rivers, harbors, beaches, and trading centers surrounding them. This interview has been edited for length and took place in September over Zoom.
Ryan Asmussen
I’d like to begin this interview in the same way you begin your book, with your wonderful evocation of a trip you and your wife took, sailing around the coast of Turkey. Can you give us a little background on that and tell us how it was inspirational for How to Be?
Adam Nicolson
The sea is genuinely an inspiring place for me. You can shed the context of the world there, more so than in the mountains or in cultivated country. The sea is a kind of tabula rasa, a naked place. I’ve written about the sea in Scotland and also in the Aegean. People are always going sailing and chartering yachts in Greece as a fun holiday thing, but for me it’s an access to poetry, to the real. The sea allows you to encounter the ageless. We’d charted a boat and were kind of tootling around the Greek islands off the coast of Turkey. There’s a modern border there, incredibly snaky, and it’s quite difficult to cross it, an extremely bureaucratic effort, but the sea there has this incredible combination of surface glitter and ever-changing perspectives of blue-gray islands and blue-gray forms of the land. You’re in this completely, instantly mythological world. Well, on that trip, I had with me the book co-written by my wife Sarah Raven’s father (The Presocratic Philosophers, 1957), the one all classics students know as ‘Kirk and Raven’ and as the absolute bane of their lives because it’s so difficult, so impenetrable, but also so good you end up making the effort. I never met my father-in-law, but I can love him from afar for his absolute devotion to these early Greek thinkers. In any case, I had his book with me, and I viscerally realized as we were sailing along that I was enveloped in the earthly province of philosophy. Only 20 miles away from us was Miletus with all those first thinkers like Anaximander and Anaximenes, considering the nature and substance of existence, and then 25 miles over was Ephesus where Heraclitus, the first thinker on the contradictoriness of things, was from, and maybe 40 miles away Lesbos, the home of lyric poetry. So, you have this unbelievable concentration of originality and energy of mind, really, in a place of such exquisite beauty, and I wanted to know more about this area, its ancient proximities, its ideas and influences.
Ryan Asmussen
You take your reader through these seminal philosophers chronologically and show the influence of their environments, the actual geography of the places, upon them. You talk about “the fluid world” and “the harbor mind” and take great pains to articulate these sensibilities via a Bronze Age-framework of, among other disciplines, science and mysticism, and then how these two begin to converge and blend in the Iron Age.
Adam Nicolson
The Bronze Age ended, say, around 1100 BCE with this extraordinary collapse of the great empires in Mesopotamia and Eastern Turkey, the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, that world of rigid hierarchies and palace-based cultures. Their essential movement was centripetal, dragging people and resources towards the grand monarchical center. This was both a model of life on earth and of the cosmos. A central god-king dominated culture, and it all collapsed for whatever reason. We really don’t know why. Then, the Dark Ages, although historians don’t like that term anymore. Writing, metalwork, even those great palaces disappear, and a wild, bandit-world emerges. In time, nascent city-states—not on the modern-day Greek mainland but largely on the Aegean shores of modern-day Turkey—develop and you have the emergence of a particular isolated, self-sufficient mercantile power center without a dominating monarchy.
Ryan Asmussen
And this transfer of power and agency generates a particular frame of mind—
Adam Nicolson
—Yes, this generates a frame of mind which is about fluidity; this is the harbor mind, the idea that in fact what matters, if you’re a small city-state with not many resources, is connection with others, trading, the absorption of culture and ideas. The method is no longer about a central identification but about the fusion of things that could matter. So, you can take stories, you can take poetry, you can take mathematical ideas from the Babylonians, for example, astronomical ways of doing things, and make an amalgam from them. If you can allow for this kind of multiplicity of factors to have meaning as a people, then your frame of mind will cross the boundary between religion and science; it will understand that the poetic as well as scientific has access to wisdom. Anaximenes talks about the world’s breath, that each of the breaths that we breathe are only an aspect of the world’s breath, the great cosmic breath. That is a highly beautiful, poetic idea to me, yet it also has a scientific dimension to it, how we are only transient emanations of a cosmos influx. Actually, it’s exactly what science now thinks to be true. The material world is just flowing through us; we are just the current wave of that motion.
Ryan Asmussen
It strikes me that this merging of the scientific mind with the mystical mind produced the concept of justice, the idea that between what evidently is and what might be, metaphysically, is what ought to be, what’s right and due to people. It begins to flower in Ionia about this time.
Adam Nicolson
One of the contentions of English philosopher Gillian Rose was that the three necessary attitudes for the good life are 1) intellectual eros—the vigorous desire to be curious, to admit that in the end you don’t know something; 2) attention—the ability to concentrate and examine objectively; and 3) acceptance— accepting humbly that there may be no solutions. If you think of this on a social level, she says, desire and concentration creates a kind of sociability, a connectedness, which in turn must be about law, about establishing the frame within which a viable social life can work, and then acceptance of the city must generate justice, the notion that singular claims cannot override others. Some of our early thinkers here said we could also look at this at the cosmic level.
So, one could have a longing attention to metaphysics which results in a cosmic acceptance that there might, in fact, be no meaning, or that it’s marvelous that there is no meaning, or some kind of meaning. Rose never quite articulated it like that, but in my mind it’s exactly the grid across which these thinkers roam. I haven’t spoken to people about this before, but it’s very prominent in my mind. The open-endedness of these thinkers’ world, no closed boundaries at the sea edge of these cities, allows for a liberated way of living. Perhaps, this is a bit sentimentalist. There was also violent slave trading, something that was ferociously competitive and cruel. I don’t think we need to sentimentalize this. It was no sweet, ideal world.
Ryan Asmussen
The move from divine power to human capacity was one of the most vital shifts of consciousness, emerging as it did from a sense of an autonomous self, apart from the grip of gods or kings. It gave us philosophy, essentially. And yet, the hopefully-not-apocryphal story of Thales and the enslaved girl is a kind of delicious cautionary tale, bumping up against the possibility of a philosopher’s self-importance. [From the book: “While [Thales] was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a well; and it is said that a beautiful and witty Thracian slave girl laughed at him because he was so keen to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there behind him, right at his feet.”]
Adam Nicolson
Well, it is very interesting. I was talking publicly about this story last night, in fact, and I had my usual take on it, which is that there’s a sort of shamefulness in the philosopher’s self-deception, his fixedly high-minded stumbling backwards into the real world, and there was a Greek woman in the audience who said, “No, no! You’ve got this entirely wrong. Don’t you know how wonderful the lives of people who look after the laundry can be? How absolutely marvelous it can be to be completely attentive to the everyday workings of life? And for the girl to engage with the bucket and the well, how much better is that than an idiot connection to the stars?” And I really heard that. I mean, conventionally, that story is read as how wonderful it is to be a philosopher so disconnected from everyday concerns, or it’s read from the feminist perspective about how terrible it is that the only reason Thales can be like that is because of this enslaved youth, that it’s shocking how philosophy is so dependent on the exploitation of the poorly paid or enslaved workers. But there’s a third take, that in fact the good life is being lived by that brilliant girl laughing in the night. Clearly, there’s no such thing as the autonomous self; the self is entirely dependent on any number of social networks and other forms of support, aren’t they? You have the Cartesian sense of self that states: one thinks, therefore one is, which is a kind of absolute idiocy in light of things. The natural world around you supports you individually. Heidegger had this wonderful thought about the agency of the Cartesian dictum: it isn’t that one thinks, therefore one is, but one cares, therefore one is.
Ryan Asmussen
I’m thinking of the Indian philosophical concept of Indra’s Net, that essential network of connection between all things, with sparks of divinity inside all. Your audience member seems to have been a Zen Buddhist without knowing it!
Adam Nicolson
She may have known it, all right! I do talk in the book about Heraclitus and Zoroaster, and there are obvious Eastern connections to be understood, ones between the Aegean shores of Turkey and deeper Persia. I would love one day to write a book about it. The whole Greek phenomenon is always portrayed as a sort of ‘miracle,’ you know; it’s just as possible to portray it as the Western face of Asia. It’s actually Asia emerging into the Mediterranean world. However, it is interesting about Phoenicia and some other places. Phoenicia did not have this revolution in thought. There were mercantile, oligarchic city-states trading from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, entirely connected and dependent, like Phoenicia was, but apparently there was no Phoenician philosophy, no Phoenician lyric poetry. So, I do think the Greeks were unique.
Ryan Asmussen
We haven’t yet spoken of Homer and his tremendous influence. You write about the Iliad as an outwardly-directed text in that, there, life is a field of play for the gods, a proving ground of suffering for men, as opposed to the inward-directed environments of Sappho’s lyric poetry, Archilochus and Alcaeus’s observations of life spoken from the complex interior lives of men and women. In other words, from the subjective perspective instead of the cosmically objective perspective. An old friend of yours, Wordsworth, would put this as “a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”
Adam Nicolson
People have crawled all over the Iliad and Odyssey to investigate the way in which people think in those poems. In the Iliad, people think things because the gods put ideas into their heads. There’s this wonderful moment where Athena grabs Achilles by the hair, shakes his head to say ‘Think differently!’ On the whole, in the Odyssey people think for themselves, and Odysseus himself is crushingly aware of his own complex heart. At one point, his mind tosses to and fro ‘like sausages on a grill.’ I love that.
There is a transition from the Iliad’s destiny-dictated existence to the Odyssey’s choice-dictated existence. Odysseus has to choose to find his way back to Ithaca, choose to leave Calypso. In the Iliad, there is no choice. You’re locked into this terrible dragnet that sweeps across the world catching up all human beings in its meshes. In a warrior-based society like the early Greeks or even the post-Bronze age Greeks, there is really no choice: you are led to war by the dictates of your hero leaders. But, in a mercantile, oligarchic, city-based, autonomy-valuing harbor world, then obviously choice is the fundamental thing of life. You are navigating the world like Odysseus. Further on, the philosopher Xenophanes will rebel against the reciting of Homer, hating those old violent stories, and quite explicitly saying, ‘We should not have them in the symposia! We should have stories of justice and sociability and the good life!’ The shift is absolutely real from a Homeric to a post-Homeric world in which there is an idea of individual liberty, oligarchic liberty, although not, of course, extended to everybody. Let alone enslaved girls.
Ryan Asmussen
If this were a documentary, my camera would tilt and zoom upwards magnificently into the heavens because now we have the incredible story of Pythagoras and the Italian point of view. We move from the physics of nature and earth into metaphysics, into consciousness, the nature of the soul, the outer edges of reality. By the way, I had no idea that Parmenides seems to have been the originator of the Platonic ideals!
Adam Nicolson
Yes, I know! Nobody really understands Parmenides, including me. Have you ever tried to read him? Exceptionally difficult. I mean, I rather love him, his journey down to the house of death to visit the great goddess Persephone. Wonderful stuff. And Pythagoras’s claims for the unitary existence of the self as well as the invention of the individual soul, undoubtedly one of the most formative ideas in the history of humanity. Pythagoras becomes a rare thing, an actual philosopher-king, a philosopher-king of Kroton there in southern Italy.
Ryan Asmussen
I’d like to put you on the spot now and do something unfair. If all of these philosophers but one had to be erased from the historical record, which one would you leave us? This is a pretty rotten question—
Adam Nicolson
—No, no! It’s a perfectly good game. Sappho, because of her wonderful fusion of a majestic presence and such delicacy, such modesty, as well as her commanding sensuality. Also, she has this powerful moral sense of how to live well and be generous. I would love to spend a day with her.
NONFICTION
How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks
By Adam Nicolson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published October 17, 2023
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