The best books to begin to understand ancient Mediterranean thought

I first encountered Otto’s book just before going to Oxford University in 1964, and there, I discovered a way of understanding ancient Greek devotion to their gods.

By Otto’s account, those gods were whole worlds of meaning, from sexual joy (Aphrodite) and homicidal fury (Ares) to more subtle visions of the world (Hermes, the traveler in Twilight) and (finally) Zeus as the guarantor of promises, and of hospitality.

He also introduced me to the idea that the Greeks saw “gods” in moments of sudden joy or inspiration: the lucky moment when–in the poet Pindar’s words–a god sheds a shining light on our usual dreamy life.

I first encountered Spengler’s theories in work by science fiction writers such as A.E. Van Vogt and James Blish, who were enticed by Spengler’s notion that there was no single history of human civilization. Instead, distinct “Cultures” were born and slowly decayed into mere “Civilizations” by roughly predictable stages. Each Culture began with a fresh way of seeing and conceiving the world and our place in it, expressed in new art, politics, technology, and even mathematics.

The original inspiration was then lost and replaced by merely imitative and rule-governed art and society. Spengler certainly got a lot wrong, but I remain inspired by the notion that there are really different ways of being human and that—even if “the West” is bound, as other writers of the time expected, to decay—new lives, new Cultures will still emerge and flourish.

“Out of the spent and unconsidered earth,” in the poet Kipling’s words, “the cities rise again.” One insight, in particular, has stuck with me: alongside and within familiar “Classical” (or “Apollonian”) Culture, whose primary focus was the single human body, embedded within “city-states,” there was struggling “Magian” Culture, familiar with magical transformations and immortal spirits.

I was delighted by McEvilley’s learned and systematic effort to compare ideas and practices from the Mediterranean and Indian worlds. I had attempted similar, much smaller-scale comparisons in my own earliest academic work on Aristotle—seeking to understand neglected Aristotelian ideas in the light of Buddhist thought. However, McEvilley managed a much wider and more knowledgeable discussion, taking ancient thought more seriously than the majority of scholars.

Our predecessors did a good job of analyzing, interrogating, and controlling the many shades and phantoms of human consciousness. We may have surpassed them in the control of the external world, but we still have much to learn about our inner worlds.

The earliest philosophers in both Greece and India—it is a fact usually ignored—were poets. Kingsley’s work is a deeply engaging challenge to more “prosaic” interpretations, especially of Parmenides, whom most modern scholars interpret as someone struggling to articulate elementary logical distinctions, posing puzzles about negation and the many meanings of “is” in a way later resolved by Plato.

By taking Parmenides’ poetry seriously as a record of contemplative experience—even of ritualized sensory deprivation—Kingsley helped me to question my own assumptions and to explore ways of changing one’s own mind and motivation that are more effective and more disquieting than merely argumentative discourse. Other books by Kingsley bring an acute scholarly and historical sensibility to bear on what has been treated as merely marginal elements of ancient culture.

I first encountered Herodotus—the “Father of History”—when studying Ancient Greek for the UK A-level exams. I read the Greek text laboriously, with help from Aubrey de Selincourt’s translation. My teacher and fellow students could hardly believe that I didn’t find Book Two, which covers the customs of the Egyptians, boring. They were also surprised that I wasn’t contemptuous of Herodotus’s willingness to record what he was told without judgment.

The myth Herodotus created—of a Western world devoted to the rule of law and the freedom of individuals under that law, in opposition to a “despotic” East—has echoed down the years. It has also been accompanied by a skeptical, even cynical, approach to any claims of miracles or almost divine insight. However, what I learned from Herodotus was that the Greeks were conscious of other, older, and sometimes more impressive “barbarian” cultures all around them. I thought the “clash of civilizations” could turn into a fruitful marriage!