The Wine-Dark Sea

 

  The Wine-Dark Sea

Wine-dark sea is the traditional English translation of oînops póntos (οἶνοψ πόντος) meaning ‘wine-faced sea’ or ‘wine-eyed sea’, a descriptive epithet used by Homer five times in the Iliad and twelve times in the Odyssey. It is generally thought that the term refers to the sea as being rough or stormy. Homer also uses the phrase when describing oxen and in that context it has come to be regarded as referring to a reddish colour. The phrase has become a common example when talking about the use of colour in ancient Greek texts.

We read in The Wine-Dark Sea: Colour and Perception in the Ancient World by Erin Hoffman, “Perception is a funny beast. Homer’s “wine-dark sea”  has puzzled scholars for centuries leading to such far-flung hypotheses as strange weather effects, air pollution, and mass Grecian colour blindness. Reading it today, we naturally assume that it is intended as allegory, some evocative reference to the sea’s mystery, its intoxication. We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an interesting light: there is no word for “blue” in ancient Greek.”

            William Gladstone, English politician and classicist, commented in 1858 that Homer almost never described anything as being ‘blue’ and put forth his own theory about what the poet was saying when he referred to the sea as being wine-dark. Gladstone contended that the ancient Greeks used colour to describe luminescence and not hue. (Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age). To that end, a deep blue sea could look as dark as red wine, without actually being red. The Greek word kyanos has over time come to refer to the blue shade cyan, but in Homer’s time it likely only meant dark, such as when the bard used it to describe Zeus’s eyebrows. So rather than referring to specific colours as we know them today, the ancient Greek’s use of colour tended to denote qualities like lightness, darkness and intensity.

            Rather than being a literal colour statement, the phrase wine-dark sea was more poetic in nature and evocative. It represented a sea that was dark, deep and obscure and was used as a poetic metaphor that focused on the deep and murky visual quality of the water, rather than its actual colour. Achilles sat by his tent gazing out at the sea and mourning the loss of Briseis. In this instance, the phrase can be seen as a metaphor for the deep emotional turmoil that the hero felt because of the separation.

But Achilles, having wept bitterly at his loss, sat down by the side of the foamy waves apart from his comrades and gazed upon the wine dark sea.

            Homer used the phrase wine-dark sea again as a metaphor to describe the emotional burden on Achilles, now separated from Patroclus, when the hero was preparing for the funeral of his dear friend.

When they came to the place that Achilles had pointed out to them, they set down the body and heaped up a great pile of wood. Then once more the swift-footed godlike Achilles deliberated. He stood apart from the fire and cut from his head a lock of golden hair which he had grown in honour of the river god Spercheius and he spoke as his heart moved and he glanced over the wine-dark sea.

            Homer often used the expression wine-dark sea when referring to the winds which blew over the waves. He talked in the Iliad about a ship assailed by the winds over the wine-dark sea and this theme was repeated in the Odyssey: The flashing-eyed Athena sent them a fair wind, a strongly blowing Zephyr that sounded over the wine-dark sea. And then came the following references to the sea and the winds which highlighted the turbulence and the darkness of the waters:

But when he sailed over the wine-dark sea in his hollow ships and arrived in swift course at the height of Malea, then wide-eyed Zeus, whose voice is carried from afar, planned for him a horrid journey and poured over him blasts of raging winds and the waves thickened into mighty things like mountains.

I saved him when he was floating alone on the ship’s keel after Zeus had struck his swift ship with a thunderbolt and had shattered it in the middle of the wine-dark sea.

Yesterday on the twentieth day, I escaped from the wine-dark sea and the waves and a swift-rushing storm blew me from the island of Ogygia

            As was the case with the Iliad, in the Odyssey we also find a tie-in between the phrase wine-dark sea and deep emotions:

And if some god will strike me again while I am on the wine-dark sea, then I will accept that, because I have in my breast a heart which bears much grief. Before this time I have suffered many woes in war and upon the sea, so let this just be added to that list.

            Writing in Lapham’s Quarterly in 2013, Caroline Alexander agrees that wine-dark sea has more to do with human emotions than it does the colour of water. As she points out,

The image Homer hoped to conjure with his wine-like sea greatly depended upon what wine meant to his audience. While the Greeks likely knew of white wine, most ancient wine was red, and in the Homeric epics, red wine is the only wine specifically described. Drunk at feasts, poured onto the earth in sacred rituals, or onto the ashes around funeral pyres, Homeric wine is often mélas, “dark,” or even “black,” a term with broad application, used of a brooding spirit, anger, death, ships, blood, night, and the sea.

            In conclusion, the phrase wine-dark sea was less a description and more of a useful poetic device. It did not reflect Homer’s supposed blindness or the theorized congenital colour blindness of the ancient Greeks, no more than it had anything to do with the alkaline water of the Peloponnese that, when added to wine, changed the colour from red to blue. Homer used the phrase, in one sense, to help express the depth and turmoil of the emotions that his characters were feeling, and likewise, to express the danger and the challenges associated with sea voyages. Finally, from the point of view of language, the epithet was just one of hundreds of stock phrases or formulas that the bard used when singing his tale, and the ancient Greek words oînops póntos  (οἶνοψ πόντος), fit very nicely at the end of a line of hexameter.