Wine-dark sea

For other uses, see Wine dark sea.

Wine-dark sea is a traditional English translation of oînops póntos (οἶνοψ πόντος, IPA: /ôi̯.nops pón.tos/), from oînos (οἶνος, "wine") + óps (ὄψ, "eye; face"), a Homeric epithet.

A literal translation is "wine-faced sea" (wine-faced, wine-eyed). It is attested five times in the Iliad and twelve times in the Odyssey[1] often to describe rough, stormy seas. The only other use of oînops in the works of Homer is for oxen, for which it is used once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey, where it describes a reddish colour. The phrase has become a common example when talking about the use of colour in ancient Greek texts.

Analysis of the phrase

One of the first to observe Homer's description of colours was British statesman William Gladstone.[2] In his 1858 book Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Gladstone analysed all aspects of Homer's mythical world, to discover a total absence of blue from the poet's descriptions of the Greek natural scenery. The word kyanós (κυανός), which in later stages of Greek meant blue, does make a limited appearance, but in Homer it almost certainly meant "dark", as it was used to describe the eyebrows of Zeus. Gladstone proposed that the Homeric usage of colour-terms focused not on hue, as contemporary usage does, but primarily on how light or dark the object being described was. Many readers, however, have read Gladstone's explanation of Homer's colour terms as a suggestion that he and the other ancient Greeks were colourblind.[3][4][5] The most controversial line is his claim that "the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age" – although, in his defense, it has been noted that the word "organ", at the time, could also be used for a mental faculty.[6] After his book was published, Gladstone himself denied that he suggested here the Greeks suffered from colourblindness, and explained: "My meaning was substantially this: that he [Homer] operated, in the main, upon a quantitative scale, with white and black, or light and dark, for its opposite extremities, instead of the qualitative scale opened by the diversities of colour."[7]

In the 1980s a theory gained prominence that after Greeks mixed their wine with hard, alkaline water typical for the Peloponnesus, it became darker and more of a blue-ish colour. Approximately at the same time P. G. Maxwell-Stuart noted that, in general usage the term οἰνωπός – "wine-eyed" – refers to a 'deep reddish-brown', but that its connotations in poetry include, 'drunkenness, blood, and the abandon which accompanies surrender to alcohol and so, through those associations, it can be made to imply unsteadiness, violence, anger, and even death'.[8] Thus, the epithet, when applied to the sea, could also be evoking its turbulence rather than just its darkness.

Development of color terms in language

See also: Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate

The 'wine-dark sea' has often been invoked, along with the seeming lack of a word to refer to 'blue' in the Homeric texts as part of the larger discussion about the development of colour-naming in different cultures. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's famous 1969 study and subsequent book Basic Color Terms hypothesized that early in a language's development of colour terminology, languages would only have a few words for basic colours: beginning with only two words for light and dark, and subsequently developing words for reddish and bluish colours, before they eventually accrued nearly a dozen words to segment up the colour wheel into finer gradations.[9] Although the theory has been fine-tuned significantly in the subsequent decades, and though even the basic framework is sometimes subject to significant controversy, Berlin and Kay's work could help explain why colours in many ancient literary works seem to work differently than in modern languages.

Homer's translated phrase has been used by other authors:

See also

References

  • Alexander, Caroline (Summer 2013). "A Winelike Sea". Lapham's Quarterly. VI (3).
  • Berlin, Brent; Kay, Paul (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 1-57586-162-3.
  • Deutscher, Guy (Aug 4, 2016). Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages. Random House.
  • Maxwell-Stuart, P. G. (1981). Studies in Greek Colour Terminology: Charopos. BRILL. ISBN 9004064060.
  • Sampson, Geoffrey (2013). "Gladstone as Linguist". Journal of Literary Semantics. 4.
  • Wilford, John Noble (December 20, 1983). "Homer's Sea: Wine Dark?". The New York Times. Retrieved June 23, 2016.

Citations

  1. ^ "A Concordance to the Homeric Poems". s.v. οἴνοπα πόντον, οἴνοπι πόντῳ.
  2. ^ Deutscher 2016, p. 25.
  3. ^ Sampson, Geoffrey (13 May 2013). "Gladstone as linguist" (PDF). Journal of Literary Semantics. 42: 1–29. doi:10.1515/jls-2013-0001. S2CID 170577821. Retrieved 1 December 2015.
  4. ^ Sampson, Geoffrey (2013). "Gladstone as Linguist". Journal of Literary Semantics. 4: 4.
  5. ^ Deutscher 2016, p. 38.
  6. ^ "Sampson, Gladstone as linguist". www.grsampson.net. Retrieved 2025-08-29.
  7. ^ McMillen, Evelyn Hope (October 1967). "THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WHITE IN THE LITERATURE OF THE WESTERN WORLD" (PDF).
  8. ^ Maxwell-Stuart, P. G. (1981). Studies in Greek Colour Terminology: Charopos. BRILL. p. 7. ISBN 9004064060.
  9. ^ Berlin, Brent; Kay, Paul (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 1-57586-162-3.
  • Homer (1926). The Iliad. Vol. I. Translated by Murray, A. T. London and New York: William Heinemann and G. P. Putman's Sons. pp. 96–97, 250–251, 308–309 – via Internet Archive.
  • Homer (1924). The Iliad. Vol. II. Translated by Murray, A. T. London and New York: William Heinemann and G. P. Putman's Sons. pp. 54–55, 504–505 – via Internet Archive.
  • Homer (1919). The Odyssey. Vol. I. Translated by Murray, A. T. London and New York: William Heinemann and G. P. Putman's Sons. pp. 16–17, 66–67, 88–89, 140–141, 178–179, 184–185, 194–195, 218–219, 250–251 – via Internet Archive.
  • Homer (1919). The Odyssey. Vol. II. Translated by Murray, A. T. London and New York: William Heinemann and G. P. Putman's Sons. pp. 4–5, 240–241, 248–249 – via Internet Archive.
  • Media related to Wine-dark sea (Homer) at Wikimedia Commons
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