Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (The Hinges of History)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385495544 ISBN 13: 9780385495547

Publisher: Anchor, 2004

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.

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Desire of the Everlasting Hills

“Each of [Thomas Cahill’s] books offers moments of genuine insight into the workings of culture, literature, and the human heart.” —Commonweal

“A popularization, but in the best sense of the word. With grace, skill and erudition, he summarizes obtuse semantic and historical arguments, highlights the findings most relevant to lay readers and draws disparate material together in his portraits of Jesus, his mother, Mary, and the apostle Paul.” —Washington Post Book World

“A deft march through time and through theology in the making . . . [Cahill’s] own gift-giving is his ability to climb inside the scholarship and enliven it.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
Praise for The Gifts of the Jews

“Captivating . . . persuasive as well as entertaining . . . Mr. Cahill’s book is a gift.”
—New York Times

“Cahill’s clearly voiced, jubilant song of praise to the gifts of the Jews is itself a gift—a splendid story, well told.” —Boston Globe

“Cahill exalts his ancient subjects, their hearts, minds and experiences resonate in his compelling contemporary narrative.” —Chicago Tribune


Praise for How the Irish Saved Civilization

“Charming and poetic . . . an entirely engaging, delectable voyage into the distant past, a small treasure.” —New York Times

“A shamelessly engaging, effortlessly scholarly, utterly refreshing history of the origins
of the Irish soul and its huge contribution to Western culture.” —Thomas Keneally

“Cahill’s lively prose breathes life into a 1,600-year-old history.” —Boston Globe

“When Cahill shows the splendid results of St. Patrick’s mission in Ireland—among them, the preservation and transmission of classical literature and the evangelization of Europe—he isn’t exaggerating. He’s rejoicing.” —The New Yorker

About the Author:

THOMAS CAHILL is the author of the best-selling books, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World, and, most recently, Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World. These six books comprise Volumes I, II, III, IV, V, and VI, respectively, of the Hinges of History, a prospective seven-volume series in which the author recounts formative moments in Western civilization. In "The Hinges of History," Thomas Cahill endeavors to retell the story of the Western World through little-known stories of the great gift-givers, people who contributed immensely to Western, culture and the evolution of Western sensibility, thus revealing how we have become the people we are and why we think and feel the way we do today.

Thomas Cahill is best known, in his books and lectures, for taking on a broad scope of complex history and distilling it into accessible, instructive, and entertaining narrative. His lively, engaging writing animates cultures that existed up to five millennia ago, revealing the lives of his principal characters with refreshing insight and joy. He writes history, not in its usual terms of war and catastrophe, but as "narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance." Unlike all too many history lessons, a Thomas Cahill history book or speech is impossible to forget.

He has taught at Queens College, Fordham University and Seton Hall University, served as the North American education correspondent for the Times of London, and was for many years a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Prior to retiring recently to write full-time, he was director of religious publishing at Doubleday for six years. He and his wife, Susan, also an author, founded the now legendary Cahill & Company, whose reader’s catalogue was much beloved in literary households throughout the country. They divide their time between New York, Rome and Paris.