In Crete the populations of hundreds of villages deserted their seaside locations and built high, hidden refuges up in the hills. It examines how the development of harbour cities from 1200BC cultivated numerous great minds; it provides insight with facts and archeological discoveries whilst also exploring larger philosophical concerns from key thinkers of the era that are still relevant today. Starting with Homer's Odyssey and moving on through Empedocles, he shows how Greek thinkers asked questions as they tried to make sense of the nature of the world and human life within it. Nicolson, the author of “ Life Between the Tides” (2022) and “ Why Homer Matters” (2014), travels the ruins of the coastal towns — Miletus, Ephesus, Samos, Elea — where Western philosophy began. Familiar names such as Homer, Odysseus, Pythagoras are explored and their impact on the evolution of philosophical thinking.

This book lacks focus and generally does not deliver on its promise; and when it does delve into their ideas, it’s insufferably boring. Almost without exception, this civilization was concentrated in great capital cities, hived around a royal or priestly ideology and arranged in rigid hierarchies. This book will be great for anybody whose reading level does not include Greek and Roman philosophy and classics. There seems little doubt that there was a statue of Hercules in Erythrae, one that was not to be recognized as particularly Greek. Travelling from Greece to Turkey to Italy, to Egypt and beyond, the individuals he describes are sexy, funny, shocking, beautiful, flawed and above all real.

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There's a lot of books about Ancient Greece but there's so few about Ancient Greek culture and this one was a treat. The philosophical ideas are not scholarly exercises in disputing the meaning of life but are clearly explained in an easy-to-understand way, with numerous rather brilliant examples. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. Would the Phoenicians, Semitic and Asian as they were, now be recognized as the progenitors of our world? It might be no coincidence that these first questions about the nature of reality were raised in a port city where shiftingness and exchange were its lifeblood,” Nicolson points out.

years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun. Thinkers like Homer, Sappho, and Pythagoras offered new insights on the physical world, morality, and the process of human inquiry.

It is Nicolson’s 25th book in a career spanning 40 years and an array of genres – early in his 60s, he even turned his hand to fiction and was longlisted for the Sunday Times audible short story award. The ancient Greeks were just so much more interesting, open and thoughtful than the Christians have been for centuries. I enjoyed reading about Homer, Odysseus, and Zeno; as a matter of fact, I enjoyed reading about all the philosophers. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. What you find is that once the commercial and trading links are sketched in you are primed for the ideas.The author succeeded in showing that an open trade and migration across the nations from Italy, all the way to Persia during that period influenced and fertilized the mines of inhabitants and thought leaders in various cities along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. For the centuries after 3000 BC, the great river-based empires of Egypt on the Nile and Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq had been the power centres of the most civilized and enriched region of the world. Nicolson, the award-winning author of Why Homer Matters, uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradox in southern Italy with Zeno, the world's first absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus, burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes. I must say, as a philosophy enthusiast it's a joy to have the early-Greek thinkers set against the political and geographical context of the times illustrating what the cultural zeitgeist around them was like at the time to produce such schools of thought. 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.