Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter
Written by Thomas Cahill
Narrated by John Lee
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
In Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, his fourth volume to explore "the hinges of history," Thomas Cahill escorts the reader on another entertaining-and historically unassailable-journey through the landmarks of art and bloodshed that defined Greek culture nearly three millennia ago.
In the city-states of Athens and Sparta and throughout the Greek islands, honors could be won in making love and war, and lives were rife with contradictions. By developing the alphabet, the Greeks empowered the reader, demystified experience, and opened the way for civil discussion and experimentation-yet they kept slaves. The glorious verses of the Iliad recount a conflict in which rage and outrage spur men to action and suggest that their "bellicose society of gleaming metals and rattling weapons" is not so very distant from more recent campaigns of "shock and awe." And, centuries before Zorba, Greece was a land where music, dance, and freely flowing wine were essential to the high life. Granting equal time to the sacred and the profane, Cahill rivets our attention to the legacies of an ancient and enduring worldview.
Thomas Cahill
Thomas Cahill is a scholar and writer.
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Reviews for Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
205 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The foundations of what we call Western culture today seemingly sprung from one place, Greece, yet that is not the entire truth. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, the fourth volume of Thomas Cahill’s Hinges of History, examines and explains the structure of Greek society and ideas as well as the reasons why it has permeated so much of what we know of Western culture. But Cahill’s answer to why the Greeks matter is two-fold.Over the course of 264 pages of text, Cahill looks at all the features of Greek culture that made them so different from other ancient cultures. Through the study of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Cahill examined the Greek’s view of war and honor in their grand war epic then how the same man expressed how the Greek’s expressed their feelings. The contradiction of the Homeric works is part of a larger theme that Cahill explores in Greek poetry beyond Homer, politicians and playwrights, philosophers, and artists. Throughout each chapter, Cahill examines what the Greeks did differently than anyone else as well as relate examples that many will know. Yet Cahill reveals that as time went on the Greeks own culture started to swallow itself until stabilized by the Romans who were without the Greek imagination and then merged with newly developing Christian religion that used Greek words to explain its beliefs to a wider world; this synthesis of the Greco-Roman world and Judeo-Christian tradition is what created Western thought and society that we know today.Cahill’s analysis and themes are for the general reader very through-provoking, but even for someone not well versed in overall Greek scholarship there seems to be something missing in this book. Just in comparing previous and upcoming volumes of Cahill’s own series, this book seems really short for one covering one of the two big parts of Western Civilization. Aside from the two chapters focused around the Homeric epics, all the other chapters seemed to be less than they could be not only in examples but also in giving connections in relevance for the reader today.For the Western society in general, the Greeks are remembered for their myths, magnificent ruins, and democracy. Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea does reveal that ancient Greece was more than that and why a culture millennia old matters to us today. While not perfect, this book is at least a good read for the general reader which may be what Cahill is aiming for but for those more well read it feels lacking once finished.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The ancient Greeks looked at the world as it was and thought, ‘We can improve upon all of this. Just…all of it.’Well, not really. But that’s what they ended up doing. Whether it was in ways of warfare, poetry, politics or philosophy–even how we thought about being alive and our place in the world–they had their hands in it and minds on it. They wound up creating Western civilization.Sailing the Wine Dark Sea follows the Greeks from the time when they were separate, warring tribes with very different personalities to the era of Greece’s unlimited power, to its fall to Rome. It tracks the various movers and shakers of each movement through those times and makes them as real as if they were standing before you. (Pythagoras was a cult-having hippie and the politicians of the first democracy are as unscrupulous as the ones we know today. The more things change…)Cahill provides translations of poetry and plays and speeches (some from Robert Fagles and some of his own) to illustrate the changing Greek mind over time. There are also images of sculpture, pottery and other types of artwork and architecture, showing the evolution of each of these throughout the golden age of Greece.Entertaining and informative, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea is an excellent introduction to the history of ancient Greece and its contributions to Western civilization. At 352 pages it’s not for the established Greek scholar, but it is a good overview and gives some idea of the scope of their influence. For those reasons I give it 5/5
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A quick overview of some of the highlights of ancient Greek literature, art and history. Cahill's breezy style gets a bit grating in this book, as he tries too hard to be casual and, I suppose, intellectually non-threatening. However, it does expose you to a bit of the most obvious parts of the Greek contribution to western civilization without having to work too hard at it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Another excellent book from Thomas Cahill, this time on the contributions of the ancient Greeks to the modern Western world. If you want to know who you are and why you think and act the way you do -- read his Hinges of History series now!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Book 4 of the Hinges in History series. I like the way this book is laid out; not so much in a chronological order, but categorized in what the Greeks brought to Western Culture. My favorite chapter was "How to See" in where he talks about Greek art and language and how they inspired future artists. As with all of Cahill's books, he has to slip a little Jesus in there, no exception here. I just think the Socrates/Jesus comparison is a bit of a stretch, but I'll let him preach.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a so-so book, drawing on a limited array of sources, and it tries too hard to make the material seem jazzy and relevant. A far more appealing book, both from a scholarly perspective and from a reader's point of view, is Frederic Raphael's wonderful [Some Talk of Alexander]. Recommend that instead of this, heartily...
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5From a historical point of view, I realize that every scrap of writing and every potshard is precious, especially when speaking of ancient and thinly documented society. But when I commented to a friend that otherwise, the Muslims need not have bothered preserving Greek philosophy, she was horrified. Especially that masterwork, Plato's Republic, which I have read and she has not, but which she knows is excellent. She emphatically recommended this book to me.I think that Cahill fails in his stated goal: "to retell the story of the Western world as the story of ... those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singulartreasures that make up the patrimony of the West." It is a historical truism that Western cultural arises primarily from the interaction of of the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian. I cannot see why it is necessary to have yet another book that merely restates this without building a careful case to demonstrate it. To really do this, Cahill needs to show that the Greeks were so different from their contemporaries that history would have been altered without them. He also needs to show necessary links to later Western culture. He does neither of these very well. In his chapter on philosophy, for example, Cahill contents himself with asserting, without demonstrating, that only the Greeks developed philosophy as a systematic study, and quoting Alfred North Whitehead: European philosophical tradition ... consists as a series of footnotes to Plato." (And if it does, in my opinion, so much the worse for Western philosophy!) Otherwise, the chapter consists of a brief history of Greek philosophy with a focus on a couple of works by Plato.Indeed, the whole books works better as a brief survey of Greece with the usual short-comings. Athens is primary subject, with Sparta running a poor second and the rest of Greece as also rans. There is little on non-elites, especially the rural population. Cahill appears to have relied on art and literature, without using much other archeological information. This last is one of his problems with discussing other ancient cultures. Many of them are poorly documented either by writings or by artifacts, and he never addresses the hazards of assuming, in such cases, that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.A slight ambiguity in the book is the question of whether Cahill is tracing both good and bad influences. The issue of whether something has been an important influence is somewhat different from the question of whether or not it has been a good influence. In his introduction, Cahill seems find his "gift-givers" almost entirely beneficial. I question, however, whether the Christian theological disputes that he attributes to Greek influence were not mostly maleficial. Aristotle has been both a blessing and a bane for science and reason, although one could certainly make the case that he cannot be blamed if the Christian church turned his ideas into dogma. In the end, I suppose that most readers will be left with the attitudes that they started with, so the book is recommended chiefly to established fans of ancient Greece.The book includes an index, list of famous people, and bibliographical references.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cahill's object in this book is not to present a scholarly screed on the merits and demerits of the Ancient Greeks, but to transmit to the reader their humanity and personality in a way that veers from lyricism to a selective recitation of how they lived to influence the rise of the West. Not for him the weary recounting of kings and battles, but rather the enjoyment of their art, a meditation on their language, and an appreciation of their myths.I, a relative novice in the historical arts, mired in the contemporary dogmas of multiculturalism, gained something from this book. It is that culture matters, and that not all cultures are equal at all times, for all times. The Greeks brought some unique materials to the table of a progressing civilization, and it merits some study to determine what the threads running through it were.Their much celebrated discoveries of the practice of democracy, their penchant for skepticism, and invention of a heartless logic, all influence our own version of civilization in ways that we are hardly aware of, and that our pedagogues of today would have you believe came from everywhere but the Greeks.Yes, the Greeks enslaved others, they killed one another endlessly, loved carelessly, believed in the merits of their race, and excluded women from their political palavers. But this is true of almost all civilizations everywhere at all times, and arguing that the Greeks are unworthy of our attention as a consequence, although fashionable in the current abominations of the academy, is as stupid as arguing that chemistry can be taught without acknowledging the centrality of the elements.Cahill's sometimes excessively irreverent style, and his annoying attention to speculations on sexual matters, occasionally get in the way of his central message, but overall he has done a credible job here and produced a thought-provoking book that is worth reading, especially for multiculturalists with an open mind.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5some thought provoking points, more smutty classic porn than really necessary.