This short but concise book by Jean-Pierre Vernant's traces the origins of Greek thought and relates  it to the cultural achievement of the ancient Greeks  and to their physical and social environment .  He demonstrates in his lucid style that what they believed cannot be divorced from they way they lived.  Vermant also claims that the emergence of rational thought is related to the arrival  of the open-air politics, which was a distinctive feature of Greek cities.

Jean-Pierre Vernant (January 4, 1914 - January 9, 2007) was a French historian and anthropologist, who  specialized in ancient Greece. Vernan was influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and therefore  developed a structuralist approach to Greek myth, tragedy, and society. He was an honorary professor at the Collège de France.

Select publications

• Les origines de la pensée grecque (Paris), 1962 (= Origins of Greek Thought, 1982)
• Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs: Etudes de psychologie historique (Paris), 1965 (= Myth and Thought among the Greeks, 1983)
• With Pierre Vidal-Naquet: Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, 2 vols. (Paris), 1972, 1986 (= Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, 1981; Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 1988)
• Mythe et société en Grèce ancienne (Paris), 1974 (= Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, 1978).