It may simply have been that the administrative and political systems of the empires had become etiquette-bound, rigidified and overloaded, unable to keep up with the demands and challenges of imperial rule.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun. 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. They were literate, adopting and developing the alphabet that in the eighth century the Greeks would borrow and adapt from them in their turn, but the Phoenicians left nearly no record of themselves: no poetry, no epic tales, no literature, no history, no drama, no philosophy. Interesting exploration of the earliest Greek philosophers who have shaped much of our modern thought, Nicolson uses geography as well as history and literature to bring the ideas of early philosophers to light, arguing that they share a sort of harbor mind (linking land and sea).New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Shaking off the mental domination of priests and god-kings, innovative minds dared to liberate themselves. 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. In this book Nicolson takes an in depth look at both the physical and metaphysical lives of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean.

Except by the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise started from, the tortoise will have moved to a new spot; and when Achilles reaches that point, the tortoise will be still farther ahead, and so on ad absurdum. 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. With many vicissitudes, the river empires persisted until about 1300 BC, when for reasons that remain opaque the long-fixed pattern of power started to fray and erode. Sparkling with maps, photographs, and artwork, How to Be provides a vital new way of understanding the origins of Western thought. We can learn from those people who lived many centuries ago and yet who seem to be not so "ancient" after all.

He effortlessly pulls together strands of history, philosophy, language, art, culture, and archaeology . He is an English aristocrat, though he does not use his title — Heraclitus would approve — and is the grandson of Virginia Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West (and Sir Harold Nicolson). He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on a farm in Sussex. I enjoyed reading about Homer, Odysseus, and Zeno; as a matter of fact, I enjoyed reading about all the philosophers.The first beneficiaries of this shift and dispersal of authority were the trading cities on what is now the coast of Israel and Lebanon. The warrior-kings at Mycenae in mainland Greece were first the acolytes and then imitators of the Cretans, and after about 1450 BC their conquerors.

Putting my noise-canceling headphones on as the construction work on a nearby building resumed on Monday, I couldn't resist thinking what a great idea it was. We see these remnants, the ruins, the museum pieces, in a new light, made both more present and more meaningful by their proximity to thinkers whose ideas speak loudly to our fractured, anxious world. The ancient Greeks were just so much more interesting, open and thoughtful than the Christians have been for centuries.

He focuses on 8 or 9 thinkers, starting with Thales, who emerged from a general god-filled world of the early epic poems and hymns, and ending with Empedocles the Sicilian-Greek. It outlined the first emergence 2,500 years ago of the instinct that understanding was not simply to be learned from priests or elders, or experts, or by imagining a congeries of terrifying metaphysical monsters, but could be gathered by each of us applying the worrying and thinking mind to the conundrums of life. Photograph: Prisma Archivo/Alamy View image in fullscreen Heraclitus, one of the philosophers who ‘gave voice to new ways of thinking’.