The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


The Lesser-Known Philosophy of the Iron Age Greeks


Episode Stats

Length

45 minutes

Words per Minute

128.9361

Word Count

5,839

Sentence Count

323

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

13


Summary

When we think of Western philosophers who pondered questions about the good life, we typically think of the classical era of Greece and the likes of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. But my guess would say that the poets and philosophers who came out of the preceding period, Greece s Iron Age, also have something to say about the nature of existence. Adam Nicholson, author of How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, takes us on a tour of Iron Age Greece and how these seafaring people set the stage for our modern sense of self.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:11.280 When we think of Western philosophers who pondered questions about the good life,
00:00:14.980 we typically think of the classical era of Greece and the likes of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle.
00:00:20.400 But my guess would say that the poets and philosophers who came out of the preceding
00:00:23.660 period, Greece's Iron Age, also have something to say about the nature of existence.
00:00:28.600 Adam Nicholson is the author of How to Be, Life Lessons from the Early Greeks.
00:00:33.340 Today on the show, Adam takes us on a tour of Iron Age Greece and how these seafaring people
00:00:37.740 set the stage for our modern sense of self.
00:00:40.740 Adam makes the case that the early Greeks had what he calls a harbor mindset,
00:00:44.200 which lent them a mentality centered on fluidity and transience.
00:00:47.920 We discuss how Odysseus exemplifies this harbor mindset and how a group of lesser-known
00:00:52.360 pre-Socratic philosophers define life through a lens of change and contradiction.
00:00:56.280 Adam then explains how a mystical guru named Pythagoras paved the way for Greek thinkers like Plato
00:01:01.780 and Aristotle in the rise of cooperative civility.
00:01:05.280 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash howtobe.
00:01:20.020 All right, Adam Nicholson, welcome back to the show.
00:01:22.300 Thanks for having me.
00:01:24.380 A pleasure.
00:01:25.120 So we had you on last year to talk about your book, Why Homer Matters, where we explore
00:01:29.640 Homer, you know, the great epic poet in his works, The Iliad and the Odyssey, and what we can learn
00:01:35.720 from him.
00:01:37.260 You got a new book out called How to Be, Life Lessons from the Early Greeks.
00:01:41.820 And in this book, you explore the intellectual development of the Iron Age Greeks and then
00:01:48.520 how their geography influenced their philosophical outlook on life.
00:01:53.420 And I think when we typically think of the ancient Greeks, I think we typically think of Greeks living
00:01:59.460 in the classical era.
00:02:00.700 We think of Plato and Aristotle.
00:02:03.020 But your book goes further back into Greek history.
00:02:06.620 So what's the time period that you explored in your book?
00:02:10.200 Well, this book really is a successor to that one I wrote about Homer.
00:02:16.860 It takes on where Homer leaves off.
00:02:19.420 And so conventionally, people date Homer nowadays to about 750 BC, 720 BC, something like that.
00:02:28.340 And Homer lives just at the beginning of this revolution in thought and life that represents
00:02:37.660 the beginning of what is conventionally called the Archaic Age in Greece, stretching from then
00:02:43.060 about 700 to really about 500, 470, when you could say the classical age begins.
00:02:52.180 I mean, these are artificial divisions and artificial categorizations.
00:02:58.000 Obviously, it's a continuous, evolving process.
00:03:01.700 But there is something unique about this age known as the pre-Socratic Age of Philosophy, i.e.
00:03:09.180 the age before Socrates.
00:03:10.540 And filled with a series of really intriguing thinkers, almost philosophers, almost poets, many
00:03:22.660 of them wrote in poetry, shaman-like figures in some ways, not unlike even prophets, Hebrew
00:03:31.760 prophets on the other side of the Mediterranean in Israel.
00:03:35.220 And it's absolutely filled with a sense of beginnings, of a new way of thinking about things and
00:03:44.640 evolving away from the Homeric universe that we talked about last time of, you know, a terrible
00:03:54.260 sense of destiny, of divinely inspired destiny controlling the nature of human life.
00:04:03.060 And instead, beginning to say, how can I make my life good?
00:04:09.680 I do not depend on the divine.
00:04:13.020 I can think myself or how to make a good society, how to have a good self, how to live well, according
00:04:22.300 to my own choices.
00:04:23.660 And I think that that's what's extraordinary about this moment, that it appeals to many,
00:04:31.120 many modern questions.
00:04:33.280 Many of the modern questions which say, you know, are we really satisfied with the inherited
00:04:39.580 answers?
00:04:41.200 Are we not in a kind of very fluid and in many ways troubling time that demands of us that
00:04:48.500 we think, what is it to be, you know, what is it to be good?
00:04:52.820 What is it to conceive of oneself as something distinct in the world?
00:04:58.560 And so there's a curiously powerful connection for me anyway, between now and then.
00:05:04.600 And these seem very arcane, very distant people, 2,700 years ago.
00:05:10.160 And yet their concerns are still ours.
00:05:14.640 And that's really what intrigued me about them.
00:05:18.180 Yeah, I was intrigued by that too, as you described these different philosophers during
00:05:22.760 this period, was it seemed both foreign, but at the same time, very familiar.
00:05:28.560 I agree, both foreign and familiar, because, you know, so much of our intellectual inheritance
00:05:36.060 is really about, it seems to me, the kind of imposition of certainties, the need to accept,
00:05:44.860 for example, the kind of great platonic vision that things of value are not in this world,
00:05:51.400 but in another world or in a world distinct from this one, lying behind and above this one.
00:05:57.420 And that this world that we're in now may be interesting scientifically and materially,
00:06:02.940 you know, you can investigate its stuff, but the place of value is somehow not here.
00:06:09.220 And I've always really resented that idea that our life here is somehow second rate compared
00:06:16.320 with the life that might be lived elsewhere or is being lived elsewhere in heaven or whatever
00:06:21.120 you want to call it.
00:06:21.940 And so I think that this pre-Platonic, pre-Socratic understanding that this world is the one to
00:06:30.860 attend to, in a way beyond the scientifics, not only about its material structure, but
00:06:36.860 about how we are in it, is, you know, hugely valuable and something of a kind of, almost
00:06:45.540 I feel like saying an ally in a difficult time.
00:06:49.140 You know, here are people who have, at the very beginning of freedom, of intellectual freedom,
00:06:55.980 I mean, this is not a democratic world we're discussing.
00:06:59.480 So it's not as if there is universal liberty going on.
00:07:02.940 It's a very, very strictly run oligarchic world, actually, just a few people telling other
00:07:11.160 people what to do.
00:07:12.360 But those few people are thinking hard.
00:07:16.300 And it's extraordinarily refreshing.
00:07:19.960 It's like a kind of great surge of newness.
00:07:22.760 It's not a surge of oldness and exciting for that.
00:07:28.520 So it sounds like this period is a transition period where you start seeing the development
00:07:33.660 of, I think we call it agency in the Greek mindset, the sense of self, that I'm an individual,
00:07:40.480 that I'm not just buffeted by my environment.
00:07:43.020 That is going on, but there is a sense that I can do something about it.
00:07:48.400 Yes, it is.
00:07:49.240 It's definitely transitional.
00:07:50.960 And an intriguing thing that I discuss this in the book is that there is already a transition
00:07:57.280 visible within Homer, between the two Homeric poems.
00:08:01.840 If the Iliad is really a poem about the imprisonment of destiny, of destiny shutting you into a kind
00:08:10.760 of frame of unaddressable fate, then the Odyssey is really about choice.
00:08:18.680 How can you navigate a world?
00:08:22.400 How can you find your way out through all the troubles and turmoil of existence?
00:08:29.240 And there's a very interesting thing that in the Iliad, often when people are having to
00:08:35.760 make up their minds, a god appears and almost sort of infuses the human beings with their
00:08:43.400 godliness and kind of makes up their minds for them.
00:08:47.140 Even if there's one point in the Iliad where Athene grabs Achilles by the hair and kind of shakes
00:08:57.160 his head physically to change his mind.
00:09:00.360 The Odyssey is the very opposite of that, that Odysseus is clearly a man making up his own mind
00:09:08.180 in his own world.
00:09:10.120 And there's one point at which Odysseus compares his own heart to a sausage on a grill, turning
00:09:20.340 it and turning it in the flames, you know.
00:09:23.160 And so his mind is saying, shall I do this?
00:09:25.800 Shall I move this way?
00:09:27.840 Shall I turn that way?
00:09:29.560 And so already within Homer, you can see this, exactly what you were talking about, that transition
00:09:35.960 to agency and autonomy beginning to evolve.
00:09:40.120 Yeah, I love that chapter about the Odyssey, because the Odyssey is my favorite Homeric
00:09:44.900 epic.
00:09:45.800 And I think it's because Odysseus is such a relatable character, even for the modern age.
00:09:51.800 I think we all can feel like Odysseus at times where you're just, everything's confusing and
00:09:56.260 you feel like you kind of have to use your wiles to navigate all the changes you encounter
00:10:03.120 in life.
00:10:03.760 And you see Odysseus do that.
00:10:06.100 Yes, and I think wiliness, it's almost a synonym for agency.
00:10:11.540 You know, wiliness is exactly the mind engaging with the conditions you find yourself in and
00:10:18.440 being inventive in those conditions.
00:10:20.540 This philosophical moment, there are thinkers who talk about the material world, but there
00:10:27.620 are also the first lyric poets, poets who, like Sappho and Archilochus and Alcaeus from
00:10:37.720 the Aegean islands, who know all about Homer, often use Homeric language, use Homeric metaphors
00:10:46.480 and so on.
00:10:47.440 But do not put the self in that epic frame.
00:10:54.180 The epic frame, which even the Odyssey does for Odysseus, you know, that he isn't alone
00:11:00.460 in his world, you know, he's hugely accompanied.
00:11:03.680 The lyric poets have almost, you could say, the self as the battlefield on which the questions
00:11:12.700 of consciousness are played out.
00:11:14.500 You know, if the Iliad has the plane of Troy, Sappho has her own heart, her own heart in
00:11:23.100 which these storming questions are acted out.
00:11:28.380 And so it's as if the self comes up to the surface of the culture.
00:11:34.640 The self has clearly been in play.
00:11:36.700 You know, Achilles has a huge self, Odysseus has a huge self, Hector and Pram, they're all
00:11:42.360 kind of radiantly present in those poems.
00:11:46.220 But they are not the frame within which the poem is acted out.
00:11:50.860 And so for Sappho, especially Sappho, the self is the drama of itself.
00:11:57.480 You know, Wordsworth had this great phrase in the Prelude.
00:12:02.260 He says, there's a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
00:12:06.140 And that notion, which of course has played itself out in any number of ways, that notion
00:12:12.700 begins with these early Greeks.
00:12:15.500 So the Odyssey takes place on the sea.
00:12:18.500 It's just Odysseus going from harbor to harbor, getting shipwrecked.
00:12:23.060 And one of the big themes or theses in your book is that the geography of this Iron Age
00:12:30.420 Greek era heavily influenced the thinking of these philosophers, writers, poets.
00:12:36.820 And you call it, they had a harbor mindset.
00:12:39.380 How would you describe this harbor mindset?
00:12:41.200 And how did it shape the thinking of these Iron Age Greeks?
00:12:43.760 Yes, well, just to go back, I mean, obviously, these philosophers are not the first intellectuals
00:12:50.820 that ever were.
00:12:51.760 There have been huge, long, hugely powerful civilizations in the Near East, in Mesopotamia,
00:12:59.260 in Egypt, in Eastern Turkey with the Hittites, in Crete with the Minoans, highly sophisticated
00:13:05.640 palace economies, largely, dictated by great kings and huge bureaucracies with a very powerful
00:13:15.780 fusion of worldly authority, monarchical authority, with a sense of a kind of divinely ruled cosmos
00:13:25.860 with great, powerful, kingly gods.
00:13:29.420 And the status of the intellectual in all of those cultures was really subservient to power,
00:13:38.400 subservient to the monarchical powers.
00:13:40.620 They were officials of priests and royal bureaucracies.
00:13:45.160 Now, those civilizations famously all disintegrated at the end of the Bronze Age in about 1100 BC
00:13:51.440 for reasons no one has really yet satisfactorily explained.
00:13:54.480 Egypt, the Mesopotamian kingdoms, the Hittites, the Minoans, even the early Greek, the Mycenaeans,
00:14:02.480 all fell apart at pretty well the same moment.
00:14:07.020 And the Eastern Mediterranean was left as a power vacuum.
00:14:10.940 And as ever, with the end of empires, many small, piratical, self-determining invaders,
00:14:21.000 raiders, whatever you want to call them, pirates, came and expanded all through that world.
00:14:28.220 And one of them was the Phoenicians and what is now the coast of Lebanon, the great cities,
00:14:35.420 what became the great trading cities of Tyre and Sidon and Byblos.
00:14:41.980 And almost as their successors, these Greeks, who have uncertain origins,
00:14:49.800 maybe to the north, north of the Black Sea, but as their successors,
00:14:55.880 the Greeks also set up trading cities on what is now the west coast of Turkey,
00:15:01.260 the Aegean coast of Turkey. And these cities were, none of them had great hinterlands,
00:15:09.920 great kind of fertile hinterlands. They were not like the great river civilizations of Mesopotamia
00:15:15.680 or Egypt, which were hugely productive of their own wealth agriculturally.
00:15:21.540 These cities entirely depended for their well-being on seaborne trading.
00:15:27.780 And they became great sea adventurers, sailing to the far north of the Black Sea,
00:15:34.800 to the far west, to what is now Spain in the western Mediterranean,
00:15:40.120 to southern Italy, to the Mediterranean islands and so on.
00:15:44.140 And so there is an absolute foundation on sea journeying,
00:15:50.060 on the connectedness that sea trading relies on,
00:15:55.780 on really the foundation of the city not being in the city itself,
00:16:01.180 but in the links and connections it makes all across the adjoining sea.
00:16:07.220 And so there is something kind of essentially different
00:16:11.340 about a great centrally shaped empire like Egypt or the Mesopotamians.
00:16:20.780 And this kind of marginal, small, unmonarchical, none of these cities had kings.
00:16:28.860 Well, from time to time they had a tyrant, but essentially they were mercantile oligarchies.
00:16:34.320 And so the whole structure of authority changes.
00:16:40.000 And instead of it being, I think the word is centripetal,
00:16:44.800 that everything gets sucked in towards the center,
00:16:48.960 it becomes absolutely at its core centrifugal,
00:16:53.560 that things are dependent on the distant, the fluid, the connecting.
00:16:59.880 And so in these cities, in these mercantile cities,
00:17:04.820 you have a frame of mind, which as you say, I call the harbour mind,
00:17:09.340 which doesn't conceive of itself as needing a great dominating regal force,
00:17:18.760 but knows about the network, the meshwork of connections,
00:17:24.180 on which their life, their well-being,
00:17:26.320 and I think their sense of reality comes to depend.
00:17:32.140 That none of them are sort of, none of them are dependent on the great gods.
00:17:37.780 None of them are dependent on a kind of rigid, dominating set of ideas.
00:17:44.220 All of them are interested in fluidity and change
00:17:50.160 and the transformations of who we are, what the world is made of,
00:17:55.900 what the cosmos is made of.
00:17:58.300 And so, you know, I think it was rarely said that philosophy has a geography.
00:18:04.420 People think of philosophy as something existing in this pure, immaterial sphere.
00:18:11.300 But it seems absolutely clear to me that these ideas of fluidity and change
00:18:17.860 as being at the heart of existence emerge from a world
00:18:22.260 in which fluidity and change are the governing facts of their lives.
00:18:27.940 Right. So you can see this in the Odyssey.
00:18:29.400 Odysseus is described as a polytropos, a mini-wade.
00:18:35.220 He's slippery.
00:18:36.560 And then also we'll see this in some of the philosophies of the pre-Socratics.
00:18:40.580 And you also make the point that the Greeks,
00:18:43.740 while they did emphasize the fluid and the change,
00:18:46.900 because that harbor mindset, they weren't completely fluid.
00:18:49.360 They tried to find some sort of basis.
00:18:51.540 And you make the point that they found a third way.
00:18:55.300 They cut the difference between the river kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia,
00:18:59.640 where it was very bureaucratic and stable and power-centered.
00:19:03.420 And they combined that with this sort of piratical,
00:19:08.600 you know, pirate-like free-for-all.
00:19:11.160 Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's right.
00:19:12.300 I mean, say you could, if you think of that in historical terms,
00:19:16.040 if you think of the term one, the great set-up empires
00:19:21.280 that last in the Bronze Age,
00:19:24.100 then the kind of anarchic, piratical moment
00:19:27.980 of what people have conventionally called the Dark Ages.
00:19:31.220 And then this third term, emerging out of that,
00:19:36.620 which draws a lot on the learning and wisdom of Egypt and Mesopotamia,
00:19:42.100 you know, they get mathematics, navigational skills,
00:19:46.640 cosmological understanding,
00:19:48.180 and even, you know, the Greeks actually take their writing,
00:19:53.880 their alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians.
00:19:56.280 And so you get, as a third term,
00:20:01.280 the setting up of a new world,
00:20:04.940 a new independent world,
00:20:07.040 which is neither rigidly bureaucratic,
00:20:11.040 nor anarchically piratical,
00:20:13.440 but somehow fuses that into these philosophical cities
00:20:20.360 in which all the great questions are asked.
00:20:24.560 It is a questioning culture rather than an answering culture.
00:20:29.160 And they start to decide, you know, what is justice?
00:20:35.440 What kind of law system do you need?
00:20:39.580 How can you understand the essential nature of the material world?
00:20:45.520 What is the relationship between identity and change?
00:20:50.600 How can identity last in a fluid world?
00:20:53.980 And so there is a dialogue between the making
00:20:57.840 of the well-shaped thing,
00:21:00.680 whatever you like to call that,
00:21:02.240 temple, a city, a self, an idea,
00:21:05.560 and the idea that change is absolutely
00:21:10.020 at the heart of identity, paradoxically,
00:21:14.380 that our identities are essentially fluid.
00:21:18.360 And I think that is a source of real dynamism.
00:21:22.080 You don't just have, you know,
00:21:24.360 pirate kings, as you do in the Iliad.
00:21:26.960 It's easy to see those Greeks in the Iliad.
00:21:31.360 Or even you could see Odysseus as this,
00:21:34.580 as a kind of self-determining pirate king,
00:21:37.680 like a kind of terrifying Viking raider.
00:21:41.280 It's much more than that.
00:21:42.480 There is, people start to think of ideas of civility
00:21:47.100 and sociability and the good life together.
00:21:51.860 They set up the Olympic Games so that these often fiercely competing cities
00:21:57.920 can meet in a non-violent meeting every four years and so on.
00:22:02.920 And so there is a kind of lovely ambivalence permanently in play
00:22:09.580 between the sort of, you could say, I think,
00:22:12.880 the fighting mind, you know,
00:22:14.480 the going out and getting mind,
00:22:16.280 and the careful mind, the caring mind.
00:22:20.300 And that tension between let's make this good
00:22:24.760 and let's make this adventurous
00:22:27.340 is in play in any number of spheres.
00:22:30.620 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
00:22:36.180 And now back to the show.
00:22:38.140 So continuing on with this idea that this was a period
00:22:42.060 where the thinking was fluid because of that, you know,
00:22:45.400 harbor mindset they had,
00:22:47.160 you highlight three pre-Socratic philosophers
00:22:49.520 who all lived in Militos,
00:22:52.240 which was at the crossroads of all the navigation routes
00:22:55.460 of the Eastern Mediterranean.
00:22:57.000 You had Thales, Anaxaminer, and Anaxaminees.
00:23:01.760 And the question that they were all grappling with is,
00:23:05.540 what is existence made of?
00:23:07.560 And they felt that it was a substance that, you know,
00:23:11.340 life springs from and then it goes back into
00:23:13.620 and then it just, that's the process.
00:23:16.480 It goes up and it goes back down and it comes back up.
00:23:19.220 So tell us about them.
00:23:21.080 Yeah, so these three early Militos thinkers
00:23:24.480 all think that somehow lying behind
00:23:28.180 all the variable phenomena of existence,
00:23:31.900 you know, surely there is something to being
00:23:34.880 which is beyond the endless little details
00:23:37.620 which we're surrounded by.
00:23:39.600 And Thales thinks it's water.
00:23:42.860 Anaxaminees thinks it's air.
00:23:46.140 And Anaxamander thinks it's this thing called the aperon,
00:23:49.740 which just means the undefined,
00:23:52.380 either the limitless or something that you can't say
00:23:57.600 what qualities it has.
00:23:59.960 And in a way, this is all versions of one idea
00:24:04.440 that, of course, we now know,
00:24:08.600 we recognize, don't we,
00:24:10.200 that the material world that we are
00:24:14.880 and we're surrounded by
00:24:16.300 is only the form that stuff is currently taking.
00:24:22.760 We are all made of the stars
00:24:26.060 and we will all return to the stars in the end.
00:24:31.080 And so it is this idea that nothing is fixed.
00:24:37.320 We are only the form that the wave of existence
00:24:42.380 is currently taking.
00:24:46.140 And I find that idea incredibly liberating,
00:24:51.440 that you don't actually need to
00:24:55.180 become almost addicted to things as they are,
00:25:01.880 but you can allow, must allow even,
00:25:05.620 if you're to recognize the reality of things.
00:25:08.620 You must allow the wave to go on its way.
00:25:13.900 And there are so many implications of that idea
00:25:16.700 about the nature of birth and death.
00:25:19.820 You know, I think one of those Mylesian thinkers says,
00:25:23.440 there's no such thing as birth or death.
00:25:26.700 It is only things taking another form.
00:25:30.640 And is that such a relief?
00:25:32.700 I find that a huge relief, you know,
00:25:37.100 that you were never really born, Brett,
00:25:40.260 and you will never really die.
00:25:43.440 The wave will simply move on.
00:25:46.440 Well, another pre-Socratic philosopher you highlight
00:25:48.500 who also explored, you know, metaphysically,
00:25:51.820 what is reality made of?
00:25:53.740 Heraclitus? Heraclitus?
00:25:55.980 Heraclitus, I say.
00:25:57.020 Heraclitus. Okay, Heraclitus.
00:25:58.460 And he also thought reality is constantly changing,
00:26:02.260 but he used, instead of water or fluid,
00:26:05.280 he used fire.
00:26:06.980 Talk about Heraclitus.
00:26:09.520 Heraclitus, who came from a neighboring
00:26:12.360 and rival city of Miletus in Ephesus,
00:26:15.580 just to the north of there.
00:26:17.660 And he is the most intriguing of them all.
00:26:23.340 He's exceptionally difficult to understand.
00:26:26.200 It's not clearly stated.
00:26:29.060 And the reason, I think,
00:26:31.900 is that for Heraclitus,
00:26:35.580 the nature of identity,
00:26:37.480 the nature of identity is,
00:26:40.380 at its heart, self-contradictory.
00:26:44.240 And that the self-contradiction
00:26:46.520 is the energy of things.
00:26:50.920 So, I mean, that's rather opaquely said.
00:26:53.500 But, for example,
00:26:54.520 one of his analogies is that justice,
00:26:59.780 and by that I think he means the good city,
00:27:02.420 the good society,
00:27:03.620 even the good self,
00:27:05.740 is like a bow,
00:27:07.720 like a bow and arrow,
00:27:08.960 or like a lyre.
00:27:10.780 And in a bow or a lyre,
00:27:13.700 the frame of the bow
00:27:16.040 and the string of the bow
00:27:18.600 pull in opposite directions.
00:27:21.300 That the bow is only a bow
00:27:24.640 because the frame pulls in one way
00:27:27.840 and the string pulls in another.
00:27:31.420 And if either string or frame
00:27:34.840 were to win out in that contest,
00:27:38.020 that tension,
00:27:39.440 then the bow would no longer be a bow.
00:27:41.780 It would be a kind of inert bit of string
00:27:44.620 or broken string and a bit of wood.
00:27:49.040 And so that kind of the pulling together
00:27:55.280 or the pulling against themselves of opposites
00:27:59.240 is what Heraclitus thinks kind of life and being is.
00:28:04.700 And so you can't ever really identify anything.
00:28:12.060 That everything has this self-contradiction to its heart.
00:28:16.040 And so I think that that is also a form of liberation.
00:28:20.920 We live in an age of extreme over-definition.
00:28:26.240 And so Heraclitus provides an answer to that in a way.
00:28:29.280 And he was absolutely ridiculed
00:28:33.120 for these ideas in classical Greece.
00:28:37.360 But I find them, you know,
00:28:40.600 it's another form of freedom.
00:28:42.420 That if you can,
00:28:43.660 if you think of an idea that you really treasure,
00:28:48.260 and the most enlightening and enlarging thing
00:28:51.280 to do with that idea
00:28:52.680 is to consider what's wrong about it.
00:28:56.380 You know, what the other thing in it is.
00:28:59.280 And that is a Heraclitus inheritance.
00:29:03.060 No, this idea that justice or vitality in life
00:29:08.340 requires that tension or competition.
00:29:10.200 You see this going on in Greek culture.
00:29:12.980 Like the Greeks had this idea of the agon.
00:29:15.260 Yes.
00:29:15.700 The competition.
00:29:16.580 It is only through that competition
00:29:18.060 where it's like the fire refines things
00:29:20.920 and you can actually see what is good,
00:29:23.160 what is virtuous.
00:29:24.740 But actually, I think there's no emergent term.
00:29:28.000 You don't end up with a kind of purified thing
00:29:32.740 that comes out of the agon
00:29:34.500 or the internal self-contradiction.
00:29:37.380 The process is never ending.
00:29:39.800 You never come to a moment
00:29:41.360 where you can say,
00:29:42.720 oh, now I have it.
00:29:44.200 Now I've refined the silver
00:29:46.780 and here's my pure coin or whatever.
00:29:50.480 Famously, he says that you can't step
00:29:55.740 into the same river twice
00:29:57.780 because if you step into a river twice,
00:30:02.380 it's not the same river anymore.
00:30:05.200 It has become something else.
00:30:08.120 It's other.
00:30:09.120 There's another river there.
00:30:11.080 Well, I'm curious.
00:30:11.980 This is interesting.
00:30:12.760 So these pre-Socratic philosophers
00:30:13.800 had this idea that things constantly change.
00:30:15.940 There is no beginning.
00:30:16.700 There is no end.
00:30:17.480 How did this thinking lead to Plato?
00:30:22.240 Plato said,
00:30:23.420 no, well, there is a form out there
00:30:25.360 that is the good
00:30:26.140 and our goal is to shape ourselves to the good.
00:30:29.420 So how do we go from everything's fluid
00:30:31.020 to there is actually an abstract ideal out there?
00:30:35.260 Well, one interesting thing that happens
00:30:38.560 with this stream of thought
00:30:40.580 that it begins in the East,
00:30:43.320 in the Eastern Aegean,
00:30:45.220 and then in its later terms
00:30:47.040 moves over to the new Greek cities
00:30:50.180 in Sicily and Southern Italy.
00:30:54.020 And one of the philosophers,
00:30:55.720 early philosophers who made that journey
00:30:57.500 was Pythagoras.
00:30:58.740 He came from Samos in the Eastern Aegean
00:31:02.240 and went to live in a city called Croton
00:31:05.440 in Southern Italy.
00:31:07.780 And the Pythagorean inheritance,
00:31:11.440 who then has followers in other cities
00:31:13.700 in Southern Italy,
00:31:15.340 Parmenides and Zeno,
00:31:17.580 leave behind this absolute fluidity
00:31:21.480 of that first Eastern phase.
00:31:25.180 And Pythagoras is the first person,
00:31:28.140 for example,
00:31:28.700 to conceive of a soul,
00:31:29.960 of an everlasting soul.
00:31:31.100 And that Heraclitus would have laughed
00:31:35.340 in your face
00:31:36.220 if you'd said to him
00:31:37.600 that there was a soul.
00:31:38.840 And of course there is no soul
00:31:40.240 if everything is a fire.
00:31:42.160 Everything is a constant burning.
00:31:45.140 But Pythagoras,
00:31:46.840 who is a social and political dimension
00:31:50.460 to this,
00:31:51.080 that Heraclitus is definitely marginal
00:31:53.960 to his own world in Ephesus,
00:31:56.340 that he won't take on
00:31:58.240 any political responsibility,
00:31:59.940 he won't draw up any law or codes.
00:32:03.440 He spends his time playing with children
00:32:06.060 and beggars the marginal,
00:32:08.280 interestingly Christ-like position,
00:32:11.400 that he won't become powerful.
00:32:16.360 And Pythagoras does the exact opposite,
00:32:19.380 that when he arrives in Southern Italy,
00:32:21.900 he gathers around him
00:32:24.080 a kind of coterie of followers.
00:32:27.400 He becomes like a kind of guru,
00:32:31.060 shamanistic guru,
00:32:32.300 disappearing for weeks at a time,
00:32:35.420 underground,
00:32:36.120 returning apparently from another world
00:32:38.740 with visions of,
00:32:41.140 you know,
00:32:42.020 the beautiful destiny
00:32:43.520 that awaits the good soul
00:32:45.260 in another world.
00:32:46.260 And begins to conceive of
00:32:49.960 the purities beyond the material world,
00:32:53.580 which Thales and Coe and Heraclitus
00:32:57.280 wouldn't really have countenanced.
00:33:00.580 And so there is a shift,
00:33:02.480 a very, very deep shift
00:33:03.840 in the Italian phase
00:33:05.680 to an idea that
00:33:09.020 through all sorts of
00:33:11.180 really mystical processes,
00:33:15.020 one can conceive
00:33:16.500 of a good world beyond this one.
00:33:21.400 And Parmenides,
00:33:23.900 who is a follower of Pythagoras,
00:33:26.460 in a lovely little coastal town
00:33:28.840 just up the coast of Italy
00:33:31.420 from Sicily,
00:33:32.760 between Sicily and Naples,
00:33:34.280 He, in a great
00:33:36.600 and almost impenetrably
00:33:38.860 difficult-to-understand poem,
00:33:42.880 describes a journey
00:33:44.340 in which an initiate like him,
00:33:47.640 someone who is deciding
00:33:48.940 to engage with mystical realities,
00:33:54.180 travels to the underworld,
00:33:57.120 hurtles down to the underworld,
00:33:59.480 and in the underworld
00:34:00.940 meets the great goddess
00:34:02.520 of the underworld.
00:34:04.280 And she describes to him
00:34:06.680 a kind of singular perfection,
00:34:12.120 a sort of beautiful, glowing,
00:34:14.800 good, unaddressable world
00:34:18.460 of kind of oneness,
00:34:20.740 where nothing changes,
00:34:23.440 nothing moves,
00:34:25.440 everything is one thing,
00:34:28.160 beyond all this chaotic multiplicity.
00:34:33.380 And from that aspect of this tradition,
00:34:38.040 Plato undoubtedly takes on
00:34:40.420 the Parmenides with his follower,
00:34:43.480 Zeno,
00:34:44.120 who is an extraordinary kind of logician,
00:34:48.340 who, sort of logician-magician,
00:34:50.900 you could say,
00:34:51.620 who tries to explain to the Athenians,
00:34:54.840 Parmenides and Zeno both go to Athens,
00:34:56.980 and tries to explain to the Athenians,
00:34:59.960 Socrates included,
00:35:01.960 about this other world,
00:35:05.080 distant from the one in which we find ourselves,
00:35:08.160 where all true meaning resides.
00:35:10.500 And that, I think,
00:35:13.980 is the beginning of,
00:35:15.100 well, it's the beginning of so many things.
00:35:17.340 You know, the idea of the soul,
00:35:19.480 the platonic kind of good beyond,
00:35:22.020 you know,
00:35:23.220 of the ideas,
00:35:25.340 beyond this world,
00:35:26.480 and that,
00:35:27.960 to me, in a way,
00:35:30.600 loses sight of everything that was valuable
00:35:33.780 in the early philosophers,
00:35:37.660 it starts to,
00:35:39.820 it starts to devalue the world that we're living in.
00:35:44.220 And that is never anything that appeals to me.
00:35:47.820 Okay, so this is interesting.
00:35:48.580 You can see the lead-up to the classical age here.
00:35:52.260 So you had these early pre-Socratic philosophers.
00:35:54.420 They're developing this sense of agency,
00:35:56.440 this idea that we can think through problems,
00:35:59.120 think through existence.
00:36:00.800 Conflict was a part of that.
00:36:02.060 You'd have these discussions
00:36:03.820 and back and forth
00:36:04.820 and this idea that truth can be,
00:36:07.540 you know,
00:36:07.960 sussed out by looking at contradictions,
00:36:11.280 for example.
00:36:12.200 Yeah.
00:36:12.580 And then you have Pythagoras
00:36:14.460 who comes in and says,
00:36:16.160 well, the soul is immortal.
00:36:18.880 And Parmenides picks up on that
00:36:20.740 and says,
00:36:21.640 this world is the unreal world.
00:36:24.420 Like, reality is beyond this world.
00:36:27.720 And so that's where Plato picks up.
00:36:29.140 But even Plato and Aristotle,
00:36:31.020 they still continued this idea of,
00:36:34.600 you can call it conflict,
00:36:36.020 to suss out things, right?
00:36:37.700 Because that's the whole point of dialogue.
00:36:39.820 What I like about this is that you lay it out.
00:36:41.780 You see how we get Plato and Aristotle.
00:36:44.060 And it was because of these Iron Age Greeks
00:36:46.760 who were making that transition.
00:36:48.780 And another thing you mentioned earlier,
00:36:50.900 you all see during this time,
00:36:52.040 is the development of,
00:36:54.000 we'll call it manners and civility.
00:36:56.280 How would you describe the Greeks
00:36:59.580 or what came before the Greeks?
00:37:01.860 We'll call them Homeric Greeks,
00:37:03.160 the Iliad Greeks.
00:37:04.840 Yes.
00:37:05.060 How would you describe their approach
00:37:06.880 to life and civic engagement?
00:37:09.440 And then how do these Iron Age Greeks,
00:37:11.840 these pre-Socratics,
00:37:12.900 start changing that?
00:37:14.300 Well, there's a very interesting way
00:37:18.900 of reading the Iliad itself,
00:37:22.200 of the Greeks are away from home.
00:37:27.300 They're on the beach.
00:37:29.680 Their shacks are kind of built up
00:37:32.280 against the side of their ships.
00:37:35.040 The ships themselves are now rotten.
00:37:36.740 They've been there 10 years.
00:37:38.580 There's no civil society there.
00:37:44.180 Who is actually in charge is in contention.
00:37:49.620 It's difficult to know.
00:37:51.400 There's a kind of terrible, angry,
00:37:55.560 unplaced, mutual rivalry and hostility
00:38:00.100 that every single one of them needs to be the best.
00:38:04.780 When they go on the kind of rampage
00:38:06.960 through the battlefield,
00:38:08.060 it's called the Aristeon, I think,
00:38:10.180 the kind of the moment of bestness.
00:38:13.660 And so it is like there is no civility there.
00:38:19.340 There's Agamemnon, the kind of super king,
00:38:22.540 the top king,
00:38:23.740 can steal the girls from Achilles
00:38:27.420 without any sense of compunction.
00:38:30.180 It's just a kind of warring, angry,
00:38:34.760 disintegrated world.
00:38:36.140 On the other side of the plain of Troy is Troy.
00:38:41.380 And in Troy itself,
00:38:43.740 things are extraordinarily orderly
00:38:46.360 that there are men and women
00:38:49.900 living in families together.
00:38:53.020 The only women in the Greek camp
00:38:54.980 are captives, slaves,
00:38:57.920 no women with any authority there.
00:39:00.360 But they have authority in Troy.
00:39:02.400 They're living in well-built palaces,
00:39:06.280 all very well arranged.
00:39:07.860 There are complicated and intricate
00:39:10.200 and stable family and civic relations.
00:39:14.320 And so already in the Iliad
00:39:17.200 is a kind of suggestion
00:39:18.960 that the warring and piratical,
00:39:23.040 anarchic, mutually competitive world
00:39:26.100 of the Greek warrior
00:39:27.480 is in some ways a failing.
00:39:30.020 It's in some ways inadequate.
00:39:32.940 And so the kind of implication
00:39:34.720 or the presumption there
00:39:35.960 is that we've got to move beyond this.
00:39:37.660 And the Iliad ends
00:39:39.180 with that extraordinary scene
00:39:40.940 between Priam and Achilles
00:39:42.940 where they reconcile
00:39:45.300 and they eat together
00:39:46.960 over the body of Priam's son,
00:39:49.900 Hector, who Achilles has killed.
00:39:51.560 You know, the most extraordinary
00:39:54.100 outcome of a war story
00:39:56.280 that the two rival warriors
00:40:00.280 end up kissing each other's hands.
00:40:04.280 Achilles is called his man-slaughtering hands.
00:40:08.740 Incredibly moving and beautiful thing,
00:40:10.760 the most beautiful thing in Homer, I think.
00:40:13.540 And so already,
00:40:15.460 so if Homer's writing that
00:40:18.080 or whoever we call Homer's writing that
00:40:20.100 in the sort of 700,
00:40:22.660 there is there the seed
00:40:24.300 of the need for civility.
00:40:27.960 And the question is that
00:40:30.340 how do you find civility
00:40:33.040 outside dominating centralized power
00:40:38.640 in the way that previous civilizations
00:40:40.600 had achieved it
00:40:41.520 in the great cities of the Near East?
00:40:43.960 And the answer to that
00:40:46.940 is the evolution
00:40:49.200 of a courteous culture,
00:40:52.880 a kind culture,
00:40:55.180 and a just culture.
00:40:58.160 And so law codes.
00:41:00.560 But also there's a figure
00:41:02.080 called Xenophanes
00:41:03.580 who lived in one of these
00:41:05.520 harbor cities
00:41:07.360 in a sort of double city
00:41:08.880 called Colophon and Notion
00:41:10.720 in what's now Western Turkey.
00:41:14.080 And Xenophanes
00:41:15.720 absolutely clearly says
00:41:17.780 he can't stand
00:41:19.860 the ancient gods.
00:41:21.260 So what kind of model are they?
00:41:23.200 They're no model
00:41:24.080 for a courteous, civilized life.
00:41:27.040 They're lying, cheating, fighting.
00:41:29.620 We need to get beyond that.
00:41:31.240 And in fact, for Xenophanes,
00:41:33.240 Xenophanes says
00:41:34.100 there is no distinction
00:41:35.620 between nature and God.
00:41:37.620 God is only another name
00:41:39.100 for the world as it is.
00:41:40.220 And so there is a kind of
00:41:43.800 emergent idea
00:41:46.380 of cooperative, civil life.
00:41:51.340 And it takes material form.
00:41:53.040 You know, these cities
00:41:54.280 are laid out very carefully.
00:41:57.100 They have council chambers
00:41:59.300 right in the heart of them.
00:42:01.140 All of them do.
00:42:02.260 Right next to the marketplace
00:42:03.680 where joint decisions are made,
00:42:06.080 not by everyone,
00:42:06.800 but by the merchant elite.
00:42:09.220 But as a kind of proto,
00:42:12.960 I mean, they're not democracies.
00:42:14.600 It's very tempting always
00:42:15.500 to think that democratic ideas
00:42:17.300 are nascent here.
00:42:18.560 They're not democracies.
00:42:19.800 But there is an idea
00:42:21.460 that those who can decide
00:42:24.720 about their own lives
00:42:26.000 must.
00:42:27.860 And I think it's absolutely intimate
00:42:29.840 with the idea,
00:42:31.000 as you were saying earlier,
00:42:33.000 that selves need agency
00:42:36.440 for dignity.
00:42:39.500 That the dignified life
00:42:41.600 is one in which you decide.
00:42:44.500 What is the big takeaway
00:42:46.180 you hope readers walk away with
00:42:47.940 after they finish your book?
00:42:51.800 I wanted to write this book
00:42:54.720 because it is about
00:42:57.520 an open frame of mind.
00:43:01.140 And I hope people reading it
00:43:03.880 will think there is no need
00:43:06.500 to be aggressively loyal
00:43:09.180 to what you think you think.
00:43:12.180 Open your mind
00:43:13.740 to the possibility
00:43:15.580 that you're wrong.
00:43:16.900 And that's what I would love
00:43:19.140 people to think
00:43:20.320 after reading it.
00:43:21.420 How absolutely thrilling
00:43:23.800 it is
00:43:24.560 that so long ago
00:43:26.380 these people were thinking
00:43:28.120 such civilized things.
00:43:30.880 Well, Adam,
00:43:31.360 this has been a great conversation.
00:43:32.420 Where can people go
00:43:32.920 to learn more about the book
00:43:33.820 and your work?
00:43:36.240 Well, I mean,
00:43:37.440 there are marvelous editions
00:43:39.360 of these thinkers' works.
00:43:42.120 None of them wrote very much,
00:43:43.740 which is very good.
00:43:44.680 And so if you find
00:43:46.520 a book about
00:43:47.580 the pre-Socratics,
00:43:49.580 their texts,
00:43:50.460 then there are
00:43:50.920 wonderful parallel
00:43:52.220 Greek and English texts
00:43:54.280 published by the
00:43:55.420 Harvard Loeb Library
00:43:57.500 and many other translations.
00:44:01.060 And I would go
00:44:01.740 to one of them.
00:44:03.140 Fantastic.
00:44:03.820 Well, Adam Nicholson,
00:44:04.480 thanks for your time.
00:44:04.920 It's been a pleasure.
00:44:06.240 Oh, for me too, Brett.
00:44:07.200 Thank you.
00:44:07.660 My guest today
00:44:09.660 was Adam Nicholson.
00:44:10.560 He's the author
00:44:11.020 of the book
00:44:11.380 How to Be,
00:44:12.040 Life Lessons
00:44:12.720 from the Early Greeks.
00:44:13.520 It's available
00:44:13.840 on Amazon.com
00:44:14.760 and bookstores everywhere.
00:44:16.000 Check out our show notes
00:44:16.580 at aom.is
00:44:17.460 slash how to be
00:44:18.220 where we find links
00:44:18.860 to resources
00:44:19.460 where we delve
00:44:19.800 deeper into this topic.
00:44:28.020 Well, that wraps up
00:44:29.100 another edition
00:44:29.760 of the AOM podcast.
00:44:30.900 Make sure to check out
00:44:31.540 our website
00:44:31.920 at artofmanliness.com
00:44:33.000 where you find
00:44:33.280 our podcast archives
00:44:34.280 as well as thousands
00:44:35.340 of articles
00:44:35.760 that we've written
00:44:36.200 over the years
00:44:36.560 about pretty much
00:44:37.160 anything you think of.
00:44:38.540 And if you haven't
00:44:39.040 done so already,
00:44:39.500 I'd appreciate it
00:44:40.120 if you take one minute
00:44:40.740 to hear your review
00:44:41.220 on Apple Podcasts
00:44:41.900 or Spotify.
00:44:42.500 It helps out a lot.
00:44:43.520 And if you've done
00:44:43.920 that already,
00:44:44.400 thank you.
00:44:45.160 Please consider sharing
00:44:46.000 the show with a friend
00:44:46.620 or family member
00:44:47.220 who would think
00:44:47.680 we've done something
00:44:48.000 out of it.
00:44:48.840 As always,
00:44:49.560 thank you for the
00:44:49.960 continued support
00:44:50.540 and until next time,
00:44:51.200 this is Brett McKay.
00:44:52.280 Remind you to listen
00:44:53.060 to the AOM podcast
00:44:53.820 to put what you've heard
00:44:55.060 into action.
00:45:06.560 AOMP
00:45:09.380 AOMP
00:45:09.740 AOMP
00:45:11.160 AOMP
00:45:12.460 AOMP
00:45:13.160 AOMP
00:45:14.220 AOMP