Customer Reviews:
 Sailing the wine Dark Sea May 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Thomas Cahill write excellent history of all Europe. Read most and still reading another, but he makes everything interesting, and real. Too much history can be killed by the authors, but not Cahill. He brings it light and fun to read. I am reading all his histories.
new way of looking at old things March 10, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Liked this book as much as the How the Irish Saved Civilization.
I am a Greek history buff and obsessed with the Iliad which may be another reason I enjoyed this overview of Greek culture. Not so much that I learned new things but found new ways of looking at old things.
 A bit disappointing February 26, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Despite the subtitle of the book, Cahill has very little to say about why the Greeks matter. The book is rather short on analysis in general, and consists largely of lengthy quotations from Greek works (Homeric epics, dramas, Plato's Socratic dialogues, Thucydides, and descriptions of greek visual arts, etc.) with which the reader who was interested enough to pick up this book is probably already familiar, followed by sparse commentary by Cahill which takes for granted some prior knowledge but doesn't add much to it.
Also, some of the choices he makes about what material to treat at length and what material to omit are quite strange. To give just one example, in the chapter on Greek philosophy, Cahill devotes pages to the Pythagoreans, who he himself admits were considered bizarre by most Greeks. This might be justifiable given their influence on Plato, who was slightly more mainstream and of course has had tremendous historical influence. But then, turning to Aristotle, he spends a paragraph giving a brief list of a few of Aristotle's tremendous achievements (such as inventing formal logic and the science of biology), but then dismisses the subject by saying that Aristotle is "boring." I'm not kidding. He also says that Aristotle didn't have the philosophical scope, depth or insight of his master Plato, but this is certainly debatable to say the least, and in a book about why the Greeks matter to Western civilization, this treatment of Aristotle (the rediscovery of whose works in the Middle Ages led to the Renaissance) is really inexplicable, and unforgivable.
If you are interested in the Greeks but have only sketchy knowledge about them, this might be an okay introduction. Otherwise, skip it.
 Excellent Historian November 21, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Thomas Cahill is arguably one of the best historians writing today.
The Hinges of History series is phenomenal.
Aegean Genesis September 22, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
All of the books in Thomas Cahill's Hinges of History popular history series are engaging and occasionally irreverent. Sometimes, however, a book's title premise does end up seeming just a bit smaller than the number of pages allotted to it. In "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Why the Greeks Matter," the reverse is true. The book's covers struggle to contain the ideas within. To paraphrase Peter Benchley: You're going to need a bigger book. Cahill doesn't though. Somehow he manages to fit much of the genesis of the long journey to who we are today within the book's 304 pages of text and appendices. The reader will find philosophy, theatre, history, sculpture and rhetoric, and many other Greek roots of Western civilization, all bubbling up in Mr. Cahill's happy cauldron.
After reading Edith Hamilton's classic popular history "The Greek Way," a person could legitimately feel that he or she has learned much through Ms. Hamilton's literate and well-reasoned presentation of ancient Greek thought and deed. On the other hand, when a reader finishes "Why the Greeks Matter," he or she may feel the need to rush out and devour Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar, Sappho and Plato. That same reader may also feel a compulsion to book a flight to Greece in order to be able to look up from a guide book and see the Parthenon atop the Acropolis or to sail the wine-dark sea in a ship of any hue.
The Greeks do matter, and Mr. Cahill makes a reader want to realize that truth.
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