Wine-dark sea is a traditional English translation of oînops póntos (οἶνοψπόντος, IPA: /ôi̯.nops pón.tos/), from oînos (οἶνος, "wine") + óps (ὄψ, "eye; face"), a Homeric epithet.
Karlovasi, Greece - demonstrating color variation in the Mediterranean Sea
A literal translation is "wine-face 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 is it 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
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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 was instead primarily referring to how light or dark the object being described was. His work was almost immediately misinterpreted as a claim about whether the ancient Greeks could see certain colours or not - a claim with which Gladstone completely disagreed.[3] Despite this, the misconception of Gladstone's position has been repeated until the present, appearing recently in such works as Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages.[4]
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.[citation needed] 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'.[5] Thus, the epithet, when applied to the sea, could also be evoking its turbulence rather than just its darkness.
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.[6] 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.
Popular culture references
Homer's translated phrase has been used by other authors.
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