Can the ancient Greeks really offer us ‘life lessons’ today?

Adam Nicolson’s seductive new book –a voyage around early Greek thought – opens with a lovely passage. Moored with his wife off the island of Samos, Nicolson rises at first light, with ‘only the cats awake’, to find that other boats have come in during the night and laid their anchor lines over his. Our action-man author dives in and swims down ‘the 12 feet or so to the sandy sea floor, hand over hand and link by link down the chain, looking for the tangle that needed to be undone’. It’s a metaphor for the task he sets himself in How To Be, which aims to separate out the strands of thought that originated in Greece between 650 and 450 BC.

Pythagoras eventually emerged from a hole in the ground to declare that he had visited the land of the dead

Already there’s a lesson here. Anyone who assumed the Greek miracle mainly happened in Athens will be reminded that the early breakthroughs occurred in the islands on the far side of the Aegean over by Turkey (Homer, Heraclitus), and later migrated to southern Italy and Sicily (Pythagoras, Empedocles). As part of his remit, Nicolson visits (or recalls his visits to) these sun-struck spots to soak up their psycho-geography. His organising thesis is that western thought arose from a ‘harbour mind’, one that was attuned to the meeting of land and water, open to the flux of the sea while aware of the fixedness of land. He maps this on to Bertrand Russell’s observation that philosophy was born out of the ‘conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science’.

This is hard to prove one way or another. You might equally well argue that the clarity of light in the Aegean had an effect, or the impassable rockiness of the interiors.