Thomas Cahill quotes

Athenian democracy was different from the much later American form, not only because it was the expression of a single city-state but because it was a direct [democracy], rather than a representative democracy. To us, looking backwards, it may seem imprudent to invite all citizens to vote on all major initiatives, but Solon was right to appreciate that no Athenian freeman could allow himself to be left out of anything. (Thomas Cahill)
A century after the death of Patrick... there were few Romans left in western Europe. [By the mid sixth century] the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian-that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Irish generosity extended not only to a variety of people but to a variety of ideas. ...they brought into their libraries everything they could lay their hands on. ...Not for them the scruples of Saint Jerome... they began to devour all of the old Greek and Latin pagan literature that came their way. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The Irish of the late fifth and early sixth centuries soon found a solution... the Green Martyrdom, opposing it to the conventional Red Martyrdom of blood. The Green Martyrs... retreated to the woods, or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island... there to study the scriptures and commune with God. View quote
Thomas Cahill
It is... ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Lacking cities, Ireland didn't quite see the point of bishops, and gradually these were replaced in importance by abbots and-in a development that would make any self-respecting Roman's blood run cold-abbesses. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind. View quote
Thomas Cahill
We can understand Greek religion because, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Unfortunately, much of the post-Homeric poetry-called lyric poetry because it was usually sung to a lyre-was lost in the upheavals of subsequent centuries, especially in the depredations and decay that would follow the barbarian incursions into the Greco-Roman world in the fifth century A. D. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The Greeks never thought to unite all Greek speakers in one political union. Because each Greek gloried in his singular excellence-and each Greek clan gloried similarly-it was hard enough to unite a city. Each city or polis-from which come our words politics, politician, metropolis-thought itself unrivaled in some essential quality and reveled in its reputation. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B. C. ...the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history. (Thomas Cahill)
They [the Greeks] had become an essentially secular people. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Of the many people's of the earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all. ...basically a businessman's religion of contractual obligations. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing: the Irish will never change. View quote
Thomas Cahill
More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Latin literature would almost certainly have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of the Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down. View quote
Thomas Cahill
This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker. But I think we may chalk up this attitude to his Irishness. View quote
Thomas Cahill
When Donald Rumsfeld, a practical imperialist if ever there was one, took over the Pentagon, he commissioned a study of how ancient empires maintained their hegemony. Might he more profitably study how they lost all they had gained? View quote
Thomas Cahill
Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Patrick... understood that, though Christianity was not inextricably wedded to Roman custom, it could not survive without Roman literacy. (Thomas Cahill)
In another of history's terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the plastic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Whereas elsewhere in Europe, no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular, the Irish thought that all language was game-and too much fun to be deprived of any part of it. They were still too childlike and playful to find any value in snobbery. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God... by imitating God's justice and mercy. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was universally available-and nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used more sparingly for the most honored texts. View quote
Thomas Cahill