Book Review: Why The Greeks Matter

Greek history achieves annoying perfection

By Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
Special to The Seattle Times

It's not easy to pick on Thomas Cahill. The bestselling author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization," "The Gifts of the Jews," and "Desire of the Everlasting Hills," has a winning formula for fascinating subjects not widely explored by popular writers. 

Cahill's newest book, "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $27.50) is particularly hard to nitpick. Criticizing a guy who holds forth knowledgeably on ancient Greece (and translates its lyric poetry) is like saying an acrobat's back flip isn't all that high. Go ahead, try it yourself, sister.

Still, it has to be said: For all its commendable content, there's something irritating about this book. The thesis, of course, is perfectly sound: Much of what and who we are, good and bad, is directly traceable to Greek influence. Without the legacy of that remarkable civilization, we'd lack the art, language, political process and military abilities that are foundations of modern-day Western society. And Cahill has an impressive knowledge of the Greek world which allows him to seize on examples that are particularly relevant today.

Perhaps what grates is his strenuous effort to be sure we don't go more than a few pages without proof of that relevancy. Using contemporary analogies to bring home the idiosyncrasies of, say, Socrates, backfires when it is overdone:

 "In Greek eyes, Socrates was a squat ugly, barefoot man who did not bathe too often and was easy to spot shuffling through the agora or passing the time in his favorite hangout, the shop of Simon the Cobbler." Great stuff! Can't you just picture the man?

And a few lines later, there's a pithy summing up of the teaching method that bears Socrates' name: "His series of questions... irked a great many citizens, since the abysmal ignorance of the person being questioned would be gradually, painfully, inexorably exposed to public view."

But by the time this next bit crops up, the contemporization gimmick is a bit wearisome: "Like an aging rock star whose unsavory lifestyle and consummate cool make him a favorite target of parents, Socrates was in danger of becoming the victim of his own successes as 'the Socratic method' turned into a byword for smart-assed, if inscrutable, backtalk."

When Cahill doesn't labor so mightily to squeeze history into a hipper form, the result is more satisfying — and we hoi polloi (common people) are still entertained. His admirable skill at summing up movements of enormous complexity surface throughout the book, and one can watch for these interludes while skimming through the annoying bits. Often these summaries are rounded out by a nice little fact guaranteed to stick in a reader's mind in the way of well-turned trivia.

Turning to the Greek innovation of studying philosophy as a science, Cahill writes simply: "They wanted to find out what made the universe work." Without a solid theory of cosmic origins, he explains, the Greeks assumed their world "was, in some profound sense, eternal: it has always been there, so far as they could determine, and always would be." Then comes the small trivia gem: "World without end," the phrase that concludes many old-fashioned Christian prayers is not a Judeo-Christian concept but a Greek one."

Despite the imperfections, this book will surely follow Cahill's three "Hinges of History" efforts into best-sellerdom, and it probably should. A lot can be forgiven by the time the reader discovers that Cahill has included the glorious full text of Pericles' funeral oration over the dead Athenian soldiers — especially poignant in our own time of war. Urging us to read this stirring speech with an eye to its inspiring later use by Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy does us all a good turn. You might even call it a perfect back flip.

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