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| Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas Cahill
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  68 reviews
Sales Rank: 62753
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0385495536
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.09821
EAN: 9780385495530
ASIN: 0385495536
Publication Date: October 28, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 A history of us August 15, 2008
Fourth in the Hinges of History series, following up on
the Jews (The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (Hinges of History))
the Irish (How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History))
and Jesus (Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History))
Cahill wraps up his typically short but powerful summary and popularization (in the best sense of the word) by showing how these disparate influences created our modern world.
Cahill has a gift of pulling in seemingly disconnected, trivial and fascinating facts and weaving them into a history of us with insights you will find nowhere else stated so simply and well.
For example, here we learn about the Greek way of thinking about life--the ephemeral trumps the material, life persists through reincarnation--how that contrasts with the Hebrew way of thinking--physical life is all there is, the finite soul dies with the body--and how out of these threads we have the Judeo-Christian ethic we call our own today.
 Brilliant! July 24, 2008
Thomas Cahill's fourth book, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, is part of his ongoing seven book history of western civilization entitled The Hinges of History. The book is a spectacular, wild ride through Grecian philosophy, art, politics and culture from its infancy through to its demise. Cahill writes so fluidly and descriptively one would think of him as an accomplished novelist first, historian second. This is not the case however as Cahill exhibits historical brilliance throughout the entire text.
The book culminates with the advent of Western history in what Cahill describes as "the Meeting of the Waters, the point at which the two great rivers of our cultural patrimony - the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian - flow into each other to become the mighty torrent of Western Civilization."
Having been recently reading N.T. Wright's excellent, and exhaustive book - The Resurrection of the Son of God, I recognized immediately Cahill's historical support of a main premise of Wright's that the concept of bodily resurrection, though foreshadowed in Hebrew history, was unexpected and a new work of God reflected in Christianity and borrowed from no one.
Cahill writes "...the idea of physical resurrection struck them (the Greeks) as ghoulish. Who wants his body back anyway, once he's got rid of it? Matter is the very principle of unintelligibility. Best to be done with it. For the Jews, who had little or no belief in the immortality of the soul, only salvation in one's body could have any meaning."
I highly recommend this book as a must read. Cahill packs ridiculous amounts of information into a small space and much of it spectacularly relevant to our own experience today. I should warn readers that Cahill often becomes vulgar as he is describing sexual attitudes in Grecian art and culture. Whether this is because he wants to reflect the culture as realistically as possible or this is simply his own character it is hard to tell though I suspect a mix of both is the truth.
The book is a classic as his series is bound to be...read it.
Accessible, insightful intellectual history of the Greeks July 5, 2008
Thomas Cahill's "Hinges of History" series has emerged as one of the most popular series of intellectual histories ever written, and also the most important. Intellectual history is often written by historians for historians, and you need at least a Master's degree to get past Chapter One. Cahill is among the most accessible intellectual historians writing today, but he cannot be accused of dumbing things down for his audience.
Cahill's take on the Greeks is that they have laid the foundation for virtually all of Western Civilization - for both good and bad. For Cahill, being relatively pacifist, has strong reservations about the Greek worship of the cult of the warrior, as exemplified by Achilles and Homer's Iliad. But Cahill also acknowledges that the "Greeks" created archetypes of artists, philosophers, governors, and playwrights that serve our modern world quite well. (I use "Greeks" because, as Cahill rightly points out, the Greeks were hardly a unified group and often the word "Greeks" is used as a synonym for "Athenians.")
This is a relatively short work - Cahill has the confidence to make his point succinctly and then move on. Do not pick up this book if you're looking for a comprehensive history of the ancient Greeks or the Hellenic world. He also has the confidence to quote the ancient sources at length, including Pericles' entire funeral oration from the war against the Spartans. Cahill uses Pericles' speech (as well as other quotations) to gain insight into the Greek mind and how the Greeks thoughts in many ways parallel our own. This is a fascinating work.
While anyone can benefit from reading all of the books from the Hinges of History series, the series does not have to be read in order. So if you're looking to give Cahill a try and already are a bit familiar with the ancient Greeks, this book is a fine place to start.
A Great Ride June 18, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Again, Mr. Cahill makes ancient times come to life and gives his readers a fresh, organized, and insightful view. Many of the modern era analogies he attempts to establish are biased and clumsy, at best, and have a "tacked-on" feel. This is a minor distraction from a terrific work and I feel as though I have sailed the wine-dark sea.
 Why it's all Greek to us June 13, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Many of us had our first and our only exposure to Greek culture and thought somewhere around October of our sophomore year Western Civ class. The ancients seemed dry, dusty and far removed from the hurly burly of our modern concerns. Tom Cahill gives us a not very deep survey of Greek life, but he does a nice job of making their world positively lively, seeing much of the passion and complexity that animates our own. That said, "Why the Greeks Matter" sometimes seems tedious, sounding more like Cahill's personal (if informed) judgment about the Greeks. About 2/3 of the way through, I wasn't sure I'd bother to finish.
Taking his starting point as the myths they fashioned and the stories they told (with emphasis on the Iliad and Odyssey) Cahill draws a male-oriented, martial culture whose women lived at the margins of a world dominated by husbands, sons and brothers. Cahill sketches Greek attitudes toward ruling, partying and thinking. Whether under a hereditary ruler called a balileos (chieftain) or a non-hereditary tyrannos (only later take as pejorative), the entire population of Athens gathered weekly to empanel juries and voice opinions on matters large and small. The Symposion, originally a drinking party, started (opines Cahill) as a way for the aristocracy to forget their state of constant warfare, and evolved toward wineless erudition. The great Greek comedic and tragic playwriting evolved from worship services into citywide contests and safety valve for societal pressures. Even Plato's dialogs owe much to the forms and conventions of the stage.
The chapter on writing was particularly interesting. Greek's vowel-rich accessibility allowed children, women and slaves to read, and may have encouraged a tolerance for disputation that led to democratic forms of government. Cahill's exposition of the Odyssey is a tender reappraisal of Homer as a writer. I'm not privy to the great debate on whether Homer existed, or whether he was literate, but Cahill makes a good case that the Odyssey -- with all its weepiness and longing for home -- is an old man's reflection on the more martial, young man's spirit of the Iliad.
Cahill parades Greek philosophers and scientists, whose semi-theological and contradictory notions laid the foundation for the more systematic thinking of later scientific eras. Pre-Socratic philosophers, unfettered by prior teachings, began to lay out the scientific field on which we now play. Pythagoras's explorations into the divine basis for all things, leading him to discover the theorem about right angles that bears his name. Cahill gives us Socrates, gadfly and incisive questioner, seen through the lens of his disciple Plato, who used a theatrical device, the dialog, to frame his prose thoughts. Cahill gives an overview of the development of Greek sculpture, from the Egypt-inspired, stylized nude koroi, to the more adventuresome forays into nude male and female sculpture. Cahill's description of the hyper-bawdy Greek theater, with it's aroused satyrs and comically over endowed choruses, gives us a different
The book's weakness, I think is threefold. One, Cahill seems to be giving us his personal opinion much of the time. In one sense, this is helpful, in that it allows us to see a wide swath of time with a single viewpoint, with Cahill fulfilling the role of omniscient judge of quality. On the other hand, the opinions are only his. Secondly, the subject matter is so broad, complex and unruly. We're talking about making unified sense of a culture that spanned Plato to Euripides to Pericles to Demosthenes -- and those were the smart folks. Third, Cahill the question of why Greek war making (or philosophy or partying) matters would require us to know more about what other cultures felt about these human pursuits. While there is much about Greek life, as put forth by Cahill, that seems familiar to us, is that because of a unique Greek contribution or because we and the Greeks share common humanity and worldview? The accumulation of these problems made picking up the book sometimes seems daunting.
Cahill ends with a discussion of the decline of Greek thinking. Having lost a number of wars with Sparta, being colonized by Rome and tames by Christianity, the Greek impetus for curiosity and experimentation fizzled out. But it was a great ride while it lasted".
"Why the Greeks Matter" may have fallen short in answering the question posed by the title, but it at least made the Greeks lest of a dusty lot, and more alive and relevant. Mission accomplished, I should say.
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