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

Rating:
Summary: Putting it all together
Review: I was surprised by the relatively cool evaluations of this book! I have a bushel of fragments about Greek civilization beginning with Durant's Life of Greece in the eighth grade, but Cahill has sorted my fragments into a coherent mosaic which also brings it into the perspective of contemporary life. How many references I have in my "bushel" to Pericles's Funeral Oration, but why had I never read it complete, and freshly translated? Thank you, Mr. Cahill!

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing, offensive, annoying.
Review: Mr. Cahill is an accomplished, erudite, sophisticated academic with a gift for simplifying the complexities of ancient civilizations and, thereby, making them accessible to the casual modern reader. Sadly, in Sailing the Wine-Dark Seas, he has allowed his obvious preoccupation with base erotica (often stooping to vulgar phrases that most who are reading this text would not use in discourse with close friends)to obscure the assumed goal of enlightening the masses. Athough clearly more than adequately conversant with the culture under discussion, Cahill provides the reader with only the most superficial analysis and precious little original thought. In addition, Mr. Cahill's anti-Bush political beliefs are permitted to intrude into the narrative, serving only to demean his scholarship and date his work. A very disappointing offering in what is otherwise an excellent series.

Rating:
Summary: What happened to Cahill?
Review: The author's excessive vulgar language and needless Bush bashing make me want to close the door on these Hinges of History.

Rating:
Summary: UNHINGED
Review: There has recently arisen a small cottage-industry of writers pronouncing the death of classics as an academic discipline. While the jury is still out on this question, there are few more powerful indictments of academia's failure to reach an audience than Thomas Cahill's fourth volume in his Hinges of History series: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea (Anchor 2003). That an apparently intelligent and well-read man could be so ignorant of classical scholarship of the last century is simply appalling.

Cahill starts, as he must, with the Iliad and the Odyssey, since Homer stands as the literary foundation stone both of Greek poetry and Western literature generally. Now these poems are extremely dense, having been composed over centuries as the culmination of Greek oral tradition. They have also been intensively studied, and even a basic bibliography of Homeric studies can run to hundreds of entries in English, French and German.

Homer in this respect can be analogized to modern chess openings, which have also been exhaustively analyzed. Different approaches to interpreting the poems can be likened to the various openings, such as the Ruy Lopez, the Sicilian and the Queen's Gambit Declined. One can, for instance, read Hector and not Achilles to be the hero of the Iliad, but this must meet a number of difficulties, rather like the Sicilian defense (Dragon variation) can be expected to meet the Yugoslav attack. How will the interpreter (or the chess player) respond to these challenges?

Cahill for his part seems blissfully ignorant of any problems at all. He adopts the approach of reading Hector as the hero. (SWDS, p. 34.) To continue the chess analogy, one can call this a playable position; the last time I recall it being advanced intelligently was by James Redfield (1975). However, there are several well-known problems, including: 1.) The language of Achilles; 2.) The genealogy of Achilles; and 3.) The established Greek tradition, which unequivocally made Achilles the hero of the Iliad.

As to the first of these problems, I do not mean to write a book on the subject; this has already been done by scholars Cahill seems not to have heard of: Adam Parry (1956) and Richard Martin (1989). Briefly, persuasive linguistic studies have shown that Achilles speaks in a higher register than the other heroes - what Martin termed the "expansion aesthetic."

What does it say of Hector, if he is the hero of the Iliad, that he does not sound as heroic? (One can read Hamlet to say that Polonius is the hero of the piece, done in by a homicidal maniac, but then Hamlet is just so much more eloquent.) This is not a problem for Cahill. Of course it is not a problem; he apparently has not read the poem in Greek and has not read the scholars who have.

Perhaps the most difficult problem with elevating Hector at the expense of Achilles, whom Cahill dismisses as "a petulant boy who leaves the playground with his toys" (SWDS, p. 66), is that it makes the choice of Achilles (too simply: between glory with a short life and obscurity with a long one) virtually meaningless. All one is left with then is the raw carnage of the poem, with few redeeming features, which in fact is precisely where Cahill ends up: at the precedent to the "Western war machine" (SWDS, p. 45). This is a gross disservice to Homer.

In similar fashion, Cahill misses the importance of nostos (return) in the Odyssey, can find neither "complexity of metaphor nor subtlety of concept" (SWDS, p. 122) in Aeschylus, launches a discussion of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex without considering kinds of knowledge, and accepts Euripides' Medea as though it were a historic account without artifice. He also manages to forget the Sophists (and the physis/nomos debate) in his treatment of Plato and Socrates, and then, inexplicably, places Sophism at a later period (SWDS, p. 251).

For a kind of grand finale, Cahill dismisses the whole of Roman culture: its language, drama and philosophy (SWDS, p. 200), and its religion (SWDS, p. 252 ["the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all"].) In this breathtaking display of sheer stupidity, Cahill has raised the art of opinionated rant to heights undreamed of by talk radio.

I cannot end this review without mentioning the factual problems in Cahill's book; they litter the landscape like empty Coke bottles in the Plaka. On virtually every page, one can find dubious assertions, typographical errors and outright mistakes. For instance, the division of the Iliad and the Odyssey into 24 books was probably "a product of post-Homeric activity" (Kirk [1985]), not done by "Homer" (SWDS, p. 62). Second, Calypso (Od. 5:57) and not Circe (Od. 10:210-211) lived in a cave (SWDS, p. 71). Third, Nausicaa went out for washing clothes (Od. 6:90-95), not a swim (SWDS, p. 74). Fourth, there was only sometimes a connection between the satyr play and the dramatic trilogy (SWDS, p. 142). Fifth, the term for the beloved was eromenos, not eremenos (SWDS, p. 178). Sixth, Socrates' divine calling probably was not from childhood (SWDS, p. 181). Seventh, The battle of Thermopylae took place in 480 BCE, not in 490 BCE (SWDS, p. 189). Eighth, the terms person, substance and nature are Latin, not Greek (SWDS, p. 257).

I have been a little hard on Cahill, primarily because he is a knucklehead, but I gave him two stars for my review. Why? He loves Sappho, and that shows very good taste. However, I could never recommend this book to anyone seeking even a rudimentary knowledge of Greek culture. Cahill is too much like the unofficial guide one sometimes finds in Athens: he shows you the ruins of an ancient falafel stand and tells you it is the Parthenon. He is not a bad writer; just badly misinformed.

Rating:
Summary: Sex Maniacs for Insomniacs
Review: This study of the ancient Greeks and their molding of western civilization is easily the worst of Cahill's hinges of history books. While his study of the Irish and Jesus Christ pique the imagination, here Cahill plods through the Greeks well-known accomplishments and begins with a totally uninsightful examination of the Greeks at war. He concludes that all peoples fight one another -- wow, the scales fall from the eyes, what wonders of analysis! How about comparing the warring Greek city-states to the fractious relationships, on a larger geographical scale, in 20th century Europe, with Parisians somewhat analogous to Athenians and Prussians a modern equivalent, at least militarily, of the hardcore Spartans? Cahill's descriptions of Greek art are interesting, but oddly the book features many photographs of proto-porn, of satyrs and symposia turned orgies, which suggest that the art of our cultural forbearers was almost exclusively obsessed with copulation.

Cahill loves to shock. All his books contain short phrases, interspersed in scholarly passages, that are especially designed to rock back the reader. The style and effect are amusing if used in moderation. In "Wine Dark Sea" he goes overboard and just seems bufoonish. While a poor introduction to the mighty and erudite Greeks, this book at least gets a reaction, maybe even nudging further exploration of the subject in far superior sources.