Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter is not really that book. I rather thought, when I picked this book up, that it would provide a great number of little known facts about the Greeks, that it would draw clearly the often hidden connections modern life has to the earliest democracy, and that Cahill would underline the importance of studying Greek culture for what it can teach us today. He and his wife, Susan, also an author, divide their time between New York and Rome. Prior to retiring to write full time, he was the Director of Religious Publishing at Doubleday for six years. In 1999, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Alfred University in New York.Ĭahill 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. In anticipation of writing The Gifts of the Jews, Cahill studied scripture at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and spent two years as a Visiting Scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he studied Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible. in film and dramatic literature at Columbia University in 1968. in classical literature and philosophy in 1964, and a pontifical degree in philosophy in 1965. He continued his study of Greek and Latin literature, as well as medieval philosophy, scripture and theology, at Fordham University, where he completed a B.A. Granting equal time to the sacred and the profane, Cahill rivets our attention to the legacies of an ancient and enduring worldview.īorn in New York City to Irish-American parents and raised in Queens and the Bronx, Cahill was educated by Jesuits and studied ancient Greek and Latin. 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.
By developing the alphabet, the Greeks empowered the reader, demystified experience, and opened the way for civil discussion and experimentation-yet they kept slaves. 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. 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.
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