'How did we get to be who we are?'
Thomas Cahill's new book is 'Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea'
By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN
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The Greek philosopher Socrates, whose works have provided a foundation for modern philosophy.
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NEW YORK (CNN) -- Just what is Thomas Cahill trying to do?
The bestselling author is now on the fourth book of his "Hinges of History" series, "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). The three previous books, "How the Irish Saved Civilization," "The Gifts of the Jews" and "Desire of the Everlasting Hills," paid tribute to the contributions of the Irish, Jews, and Jesus and the early Christians, respectively, in shaping the world we live in.
Speaking from his publisher's offices high in publishing titan Bertelsmann's new Manhattan keep, Cahill answers the obvious.
"I'm trying to answer the question of, How did we get to be who we are?" he says of how he identifies his hinges. "Why do we think and feel the way we do? ... What are the really big influences that created the West? It seems obvious to me, once you have that question, it puts everything in perspective."
As though anticipating the predictable hue and cry, he qualifies, "I'm only looking at Western civilization, and stopping there," he laughs. "You can't be an expert on everything."
Relying on literature
Cahill's trademark is focusing on people and periods he holds vital to the shaping of modern Western civilization -- and how much of an expert he is might be a sore subject.
Cahill's books are not history in the academic sense of the discipline and its tools. He does not wish to chronicle western culture from the Ice Age to bioterrorism. His "hinges" are what he discerns to be just that, fulcrums levering Western civilization from one plateau to the next, doors opening to new and greater realms.
He does not rely on archaeology or anthropology (although works of these disciplines do appear in his short, but clear, end notes). What he relies on are words, letters, verse and prose from his subjects, the literature of the ages, which comprises the second component of Cahill's trademark.
His books begin with a literary analysis of what he considers a seminal text of the period ("The Gifts of the Jews" began with two, the Old Testament and "Gilgamesh"; "Wine-Dark Sea" begins with "The Iliad") and extrapolate from there.
"What I always try to do is find out what people were feeling at the time," Cahill says. "I think that we can connect with peoples' feelings in the distant past much more than we can connect with their actions or their ideas, which are often so different from ours it's very hard to get inside of. So I find that using literature is the best way of figuring out what they were really like."
'They were more exciting than anyone else'
What appears to drive Cahill is his fascination for his subjects, and with the Greeks he seems more ebullient than ever as he describes the formation of a people whose latent intellectual curiosity drove them eons ahead of their times.
The culture, he points out, not only produced great literature, but government (Pericles, Solon), thought-provoking philosophy (Socrates, Plato), foundations of mathematics (Euclid, Eratosthenes) and legendary art (Praxiteles). The Greeks more or less invented the West's intellectual life.
"They were more exciting than anyone else. That really has a lot to do with it," he says. "I try at the end of the book to make some comparisons between them and the Romans, and the Romans don't fare that well in my comparison ... the Romans were much better imperialists, they always had all their ducks in a row, but they weren't terribly interested in ideas, or art, mathematics, science, geology, all the things that were always interesting the Greeks.
"You don't find among the Romans anything like the sheer creative energy the Greeks had all the time," he adds.
Cahill's approach to the ancients leaves little room for the examination of one of humanity's most enduring achievements, language. But, as he explains, you can't have it both ways.
"I think linguistics requires a book in itself, I don't think it can [just] be part of a book like this," he says. "There are a number of ways in which language is an extremely interesting subject within the parameters of the Greek world. ... But it really takes you off into other realms, so far that it would be hard to incorporate it into a book like this except mentioning that that's the case, which I do."
