Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

The fourth volume of the Hinges of History series, on what the Greeks contributed and how much of it was invented rather than inherited: the alphabet as a technology that put reading in ordinary hands, the epic, tragedy and philosophy, and the argument-in-public habit that produced both the Athenian assembly and the Socratic dialogue. Cahill is deliberately unsentimental about the same society keeping slaves and treating women as property while doing it.

Context: Listed under History in the adult band, one of three Cahill volumes the curator uses to run the Western story from the Greeks forward — this is the Greek link in that chain.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Thomas Cahill — the author.
• Mysteries of the Middle Ages and The Gifts of the Jews — the companion volumes on this list.
• Republic of Letters — the alphabet-and-argument thread the book treats as the Greek bequest.
• History — the discipline the Greeks also invented, in Herodotus and Thucydides.