How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

Nicolson crafts a geography of the ancient world and a brilliant exploration of our connections to the past.

What is the nature of things?
What is justice? How can I be myself?
How should we treat each other?

Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the c...