Thomas Cahill (1940–2022)

It is absolutely true that one cannot begin to discuss the medieval eras without a grateful nod to the influence, "confluence" and consequence of the Roman empire. That is where Cahill begins, in antiquity, and then moves forward through a series of biographical vignettes. By exploring the lives of the most well known figures, Cahill hoped to demonstrate the rise of "mysteries" like feminism, science, and the complex arts.

While it is gorgeous, the "illuminated" illustrations, colorful show more marginalia cannot make up for Cahill's disjointed, deeply flawed narrative. Firstly, the "rise of feminism" is an afterthought. Three women are featured: Hildegard of Bingden, Héloïse and Eleanor of Aquitaine - described as "a smart cookie" - and even then, only in relation to the men in their lives. The chapter on the Cult of the Virgin Mary was interesting, but the Church can hardly be congratulated for being a feminist or pacifist institution.

What's more, Cahill enjoys making broad, sweeping generalizations that often fall apart upon scrutiny. For example, Cahill states that the modern Romans are pure, and have remained "unchanged since the Caesars," playing host to a permanent golden age. Then, in the same breath, Cahill is forced to acknowledge the invasions of so many nomadic tribes that resulted in a multi-national society that, through various wars, was "reduced to a defeated backwater" of cultural stagnation. Most of the time you're not sure what point is being made, or if one is being made at all.

Cahill also promotes the harmful prejudices and misconceptions of Islam that were popular in the early 2000s. That Islam is a religion of violence and conquest, appealing to the "simple-minded" or "simple" societies like Arabs...you know, the culture that gave the world algebra, chess and the windmill?

Honestly, read Janina Ramirez's "Femina" or Tom Holland's "Forge of Christendom" instead. show less

Between 400 and 600, the world as it had been previously known ended for Europe and the Near East.

We generally look at this period as a dark time since it featured the collapse of the Roman Empire, a loss from which Europe would strive to recover over the next 1400 years.

But that period looked quite different in Ireland, as well expressed by Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe show more (affiliate link).

Cahill set the tone by exploring the Roman world and Ireland as they had existed at the turn of the fifth century: Rome, the inheritor of the legacy of the Classical world and over a millennium of philosophical, scientific, religious, etc. advancements and learning; Ireland, as pagan and remote as ever.

Cahill then explored the great reversal over the next two hundred years: overrun by the “barbarians” to the east, beset by plagues and famines, the Roman Empire collapsed, and in the urgency of survival, much of the ancient learning was lost. Patricius, a Briton Celtic born and raised as a Christian, was captured by Irish pirates and was enslaved; he escaped slavery but felt called to proclaim Jesus to the Irish. After getting some training, Patricius returned and found ways to well evangelize the Irish; he would become known as St. Patrick, and by the end of the fifth century Ireland had been well evangelized and mostly Christian. Cahill describes how the Celtic Christianity of this age was quite distinct from standard Roman Catholicism later, or even at that same time, and how little connection existed between Rome and Ireland.

Cahill then considered what would follow: many of the Irish would dedicate themselves to Jesus and the monastery, and not a few desired to cultivate learning. Irish monks and scribes would collect manuscripts of the Bible but also of the Greek and Latin classics and would copy them.

Thus Irish Christians preserved a lot of the classical works which remain to this day. The Book of Kells is a beautiful Irish manuscript. And Irish monks would spread throughout western Europe, setting up monasteries in Scotland, England, and what we consider France and Germany. Many of Charlemagne’s favored scholar monks were Irish. And wherever they went, they not only brought their distinctive expression of Christianity, but also dedication to copying manuscripts and preserving the heritage of a culture which had not been their own at the time.

While there were still conflicts among the Irish from 450-600, the chaos enveloping everywhere else left them alone: they would only begin suffering Viking, then Anglo-Norman, then British invasion after 750. In this way the Irish lost some of that distinctiveness in scholasticism and suffered themselves as other Europeans had been suffering in the fifth and sixth centuries.

But by the time the Vikings began to invade and pillage, the situation in France, Germany, England, etc. had somewhat stabilized. Their own would learn from the Irish monks and continue their work in their countries.

When the author told this story, it was not otherwise well known. The author likes to make broad characterizations which we today would find a bit prejudicial. But the story is quite engaging and powerful, and a reminder of the great power possible in the Gospel of Jesus Christ: for as the rest of the world was burning, Ireland found Jesus and enjoyed a golden age. show less

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. Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter is not really that book. In fact, Cahill’s book is really a quick dip in the bath of well-known Greek history and art, show more a cultural CliffNotes.Cahill, who became pop-famous for his book How the Irish Saved Civilization, detailing how Irish monasteries kept up writing and copying manuscripts throughout the Dark Ages, has parlayed that success into a series of pop histories he names Hinges of History. These hinges are points in which the whole world could have gone one way or the other and why they fell the way they did. Hinges hold up doors; they should slam this one shut. At no point does Cahill demonstrate that this moment constitutes a hinge nor does he actually go about proving that the Greeks matter.Does he show us how we can use Greek thought in the current world? No. Does he dig up forgotten Greek wisdom of some staggering utility for now? No. What he does is jog through the history and culture of a time and occasionally mention how that notion sure came in handy once upon a time.Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea spends a great, great deal of its length quoting liberally, using Homer’s epic poems (replete with deus ex machina out the wazoo and anachronisms up the ying yang) as though they were historical documents on par with Thucydidies — who he also ladles out with heavy hand. For this mythical leaning one can thank his Jesuit upbringing/education which does the same thing substituting the Bible for The Iliad. As the book progresses, Cahill lifts from Joyce, Auden, Tennyson, and every third Greek writer of note, padding out the thinness of his own ideas with poignant bits of poetry.When Cahill discusses the origins of the alphabet, first a Semitic-Phoenician accounting tool, then with vowels added by the Greeks, there are rather interesting tidbits and I smacked my lips in pleasure. This was all I got, however, tidbits. The book lacks anything like scope of ideology, just sampling here and there from the Greek culture platter.For tidbits, we are treated to this fact: the earliest Greek inscription currently known is on the side of a cup and notes that the finest dancer will receive the cup as a prize. Cahill comments that this differs from the furrowed brow of the believer (the Jews) and the green-eye shade hardness of the accountant (the Phoenicians), the two previous possessors of language. Irreverence makes its first recorded appearance at 700BCE on a cup inscription recommending drinking and fucking. The more you learn of Greek history, the more it seems that had the Greeks remained dominant, Western society would sure be a lot more fun.Cahill takes a moment here to laud Greece’s phonetic alphabet innovations as being the seed-germ of enlightenment. His observation that if we wrote in cuneiform today we’d still have slavery is hard to argue against, as it is so filled with supposition that there is no point in even making the observation. It’s like suggesting that if we drank more wine we’d have fewer reality TV shows. You can not prove such an argument nor can you prove it’s faulty. It’s a Jesuitical fallacy one wishes Cahill’s editor had sliced from his reasoning or at least his teachers had drummed out of him lo those many years ago.As a natural result of discussing alphabets, Sailing sails on to literature, where Cahill skims the surface a good deal and never dives deep into this wine-dark sea. Instead, he suggests that we shouldn’t take the comedy of a society as a good representation of the morality of a society, yet he makes no end of other kinds of literature, such as epics and epithalamia. This is simply the intellectual abuse of comedy that I’ve grown increasingly tired of the older I’ve gotten, the kind of commentary exposes an author’s narrow thinking. If comedy is of no use in determining morality — after all, what is funnier than pricking pompous moralists and shocking delicate sensibilities? — then neither are epics or any other form of literature. One just might as well have said that abstract painting is no way to understand the psyche of an era, and out goes Picasso’s Guernica as any kind of commentary on war in general and war in specific.The discussion of literature leads to drama, which does allow Cahill to waste time regaling us with an excruciatingly detailed account of the story of Oedipus, including giving away that hoary old chestnut, the riddle of the Sphinx, in the bargain. He dwells on non-textual issues like how the black blood gushes from Oedipus’ sockets after he gouges out his eyes, demonstrating that Cahill was at least quite struck by one stage production he saw. But why does he go into such complete and total detail? Has anyone over the age of seventeen not heard this story yet? I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Oedipus Rex is taught in the grand majority of English-speaking high schools. I’d even go so far as to say that having to read Oedipus Rex is as much an adolescent rite of passage as getting over wanting to fuck your parents. (I suspect if you were to read his other books, like the one on the importance of the Jews, you’d be treated to such things as lengthy Biblical quotes and a summary of the story of the crucifixion.)Drama of course leads to philosophy’s most dramatic writer, Plato. Cahill’s chapter on philosophy doesn’t provide any cohesive arrangement that moves along, demonstrating refinement and the various arguments still at the heart of philosophical debate today. Rather, he gives us one little anecdote and character after another. This guy says water’s at the heart of the universe, this guy says fire, this guy says seeds. Whew, thanks for clearing that up. The remainder of the chapter consists of several page long Socratic dialogues lifted directly and lengthy summaries of same. Let me save you the trouble of reading this chapter and simply direct you to read the introduction to any volume of Plato dialogues (which will almost certainly include snippets of the pre-Socratic schools of thought) then read the dialogues themselves.The book’s sixth chapter is almost entirely without any recognizable merit. Cahill, instead of using this space to educate the reader or to quote the half of The Republic he left out of the philosophy chapter, lends his lyre to straining metaphors, letting us know that ancient Hebrew is a tense, terse language, as efficient and stubborn as a Jewish desert nomad while Latin is the language of precise farmers who’ve gone into real estate as empire and Greek is the language of ebullient self-lovers. This is followed up with airy speculation on kouros (Greek statuary) as a projection of the ideal. And a thumbnail sketch of a variety of sculpture, next to worthless in audio form as we only have Cahill’s maudlin descriptions to go on. Cahill proves a strident mind reader, filling us in on what the various characters in sculpture and pottery paintings are thinking as they go about their drinking, gaming, lusting. And apparently according to Cahill, the only way we can know that females were at some point well-considered or publicly considered was if any nude sculptures ever were made of them. Internet porn and beer advertisements have shown how well that turned out, yeah?Moving on to politics, Cahill quotes the full text of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, a 3,000 word speech about how great democracy is and how noble those who die to support it truly are. This is followed by Cahill’s lengthy love letter to John F. Kennedy as a man who really knew his Pericles. Politics leads to the destruction of Greek culture and Cahill slanders various factions, none more in Greece than the Epicureans who he paints as no more than debauched gluttons, the usual ignorant depiction. And none outside Greece come in for more spanking than the Romans, who he falsely declares as having no spirituality or sense of religion save what they stole from Greece. As though they had no beliefs prior to usurping the Greek model. This is so obviously false I won’t go into schooling readers of Cahill, save to recommend any other book on Mediterranean history than this one.Having barely introduced us to “the plodding Romans” Cahill rushes them off the stage to suggest that it was only the meeting of Greek culture and Judeo-Christianity that was of any value in the development of Western culture. I won’t deny how influential Greek ideas were in the development of Christianity, but the shabby treatment of the Romans is unbecoming of a historian. It is the expansion of the Roman Empire, the absorption of the local mythologies of those they conquered, that shaped the hierarchies and ceremonies of the Catholic Church and through them the Protestants. What happened to more Greek influenced Christianity? It became the hodgepodge of Byzantium iconography enslaved by the Ottoman Empire, a poor companion to the lusty life that Western Christianity experienced as the mistress of Roman Imperialism. Almost the whole of the Church calendar is of Roman derivation, not Greek.Once you subtract Cahill’s lengthy quotations and lengthier plot summaries of Greek literature, you’re left with not much more than a pamphlet on why the Greeks matter. And they do matter: they gave us democracy and types of warfare and literature about people. They matter like any other sterile old manuscript, dusty with age. Ho hum. Cahill fails to prove his primary thesis, that the Greeks do matter. show less

There are reasons why government buildings in Washington, DC look very much like ancient Athens. If you have been shaped by the Western tradition, you have been shaped by ancient Greeks.

In Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, Thomas Cahill continues his “Hinges of History” series which explores the critical moments and people who have led us to be as we are today. In many respects, this work can be understood as how the “civilization” came about which the Irish would show more need to save in the early medieval era.

The author writes well and brings you into the story. You need not already have much of a background in ancient Greece to be able to follow him and the story he told.

He began, as one must, with the Mycenaean world from which the characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey would spring. Much is then made of the warfare and travel described therein, as well as the Early Iron Age world of the Greeks during which the bards would have sung the stories of Troy and afterward (unfortunately, but understandably because of the time, spoken of in terms of a Dark Age). The author continued to tell the story of the history of Greece in its Archaic and Classical periods, but did so through the parties and poetry, the development of the tragedies and comedies, the philosophers and their developments, the artists and the craft of what has become familiar to us as Greek sculpture. He concluded by considering how the Romans would appropriate much of Greek culture, and how it would interact with Christianity and its Jewish heritage, leading to a Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian synthesis which would define the medieval Western world and following.

Even if you already have an understanding of ancient Greece, you can benefit from how the author portrays what happened: its novelty, its extraordinary development, and how the moment proved fleeting. And yet for good reason all philosophy since can be understood as footnotes to Plato, we still admire the aesthetics of Greek art, we still read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and we ultimately still have the same kinds of arguments and disputes they did. The Greeks still matter because the way we think has been shaped by them and we remain haunted by their questions and quests. show less