# Quote — Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

> This paucity of actors on the stage reflects the liturgical roots of Greek theater, which continued to stick close to its religious origins. … [A] machine, called the mēchanē, was a sort of crane that swung an actor playing a god over the parapet of the skēnē and out above the stage (thus the Latin phrase deus ex machina for a solution from nowhere, an unforeseen answer to prayers).

- Author: [Thomas Cahill](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-cahill.md)
- Book: [Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-cahill/sailing-the-wine-dark-sea.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Cahill#Sailing_the_Wine-Dark_Sea:_Why_the_Greeks_Matter_(2003)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-cahill/sailing-the-wine-dark-sea/this-paucity-of-actors

## More from this book

> ...the turns of the screw that Sophocles administered throughout the play [Oedipus Tyrannos] must have been received with sharp pain... because these cocky, princely, Oedipal Greeks were being made to feel acutely the limitations of human society—in which no political leader, no matter how gifted or courageous, can remain a savior forever, in which every man must come to know that he is no hero but essentially a flawed and luckless figure and that "the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-cahill/sailing-the-wine-dark-sea/the-turns-of-the.md)

> Dour, anxious Hesiod writes about the daily round of farming and the effects if the seasons on rural life but also speaks in his Works and Days about the value of festal competitions with "potter against potter, carpenter against carpenter... poet against poet."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-cahill/sailing-the-wine-dark-sea/dour-anxious-hesiod.md)

> The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklēsia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church (and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word, which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia—which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times, who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-cahill/sailing-the-wine-dark-sea/the-word-the.md)