
Wine-dark sea - shawndumas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_dark_sea_%28Homer%29
======
fluorocarbon
Since I began studying Greek, the whole wine-dark thing has struck me as
pretty silly. The actual phrase is οἶνοψ πόντος (oinops pontos) which means
"wine-face sea." Pontos refers to the open sea, not the shallows or the sea
near shore.

For some reason the English-speaking world thinks it has to be translated as a
color word. Maybe because it was incorrectly translated as wine-dark? But it's
not exclusively a color word, just like "metallic" is not exclusively a color
word in English. It means exactly what it says: wine-faced, having a wine-like
surface.

The Greeks didn't drink wine in glasses like we do today. They mixed wine in a
giant mixing bowl called a κρατήρ (krater). It could be different colors and
was sometimes cloudy, like natural wines are today. They often mixed in honey,
herbs, and fruit. Wine was also seen as a god: we say that Dionysos was the
god of wine, but to the Greeks, wine itself was commonly thought of as _being_
Dionysos.

So when imagining an oinops pontos, instead of picturing of a glass of pinot
noir, imagine a huge bowl sitting in a candle-lit room, filled with a dark
cloudy liquid, still swirling and bubbling slightly, shapes occasionally
surfacing, a sheen reflecting the flickering candle light, containing a
mysterious divine power. _That 's_ what Homer's referencing when he says wine-
faced. The surface of the sea is like the surface of that bowl of
wine–probably with the implication of a mysterious divine power beneath.

~~~
CrazyStat
It's a nice theory but how do the wine-face oxen fit into it? Is it suddenly a
description of color there, or are they also a dark cloudy liquid, still
swirling and bubbling sightly, etc.?

~~~
lqet
> Is it suddenly a description of color there?

Why not? This is poetry, not an exact science, so playing with the meaning of
words is not only completely acceptable, but desirable. Why shouldn't 'wine-
faced' relate to the surface texture of wine in one occasion, and to its color
in another?

There certainly wasn't room for any confusion, because even if the ancient
Greeks had a different understanding of colors than ours, they still knew that
wine has another color than the sea (example: in our color system, wine is
red, and a traffic light is red. Yet you distinctly know that a red traffic
light does not have the color of wine). So it was perfectly clear that Homer
meant the surface texture when referring to the sea. The Greeks also knew that
there are no oxen which are liquid on the surface (as mentioned below, this
may also relate to sweat), so it was perfectly clear Homer meant the color
here.

~~~
Iv
> (example: in our color system, wine is red, and a traffic light is red. Yet
> you distinctly know that a red traffic light does not have the color of
> wine)

But would you call the green light blue? Because I know some Japanese who do.
Green/Blue is not as clear cut in some colors. And for many in Japan, the
shinto gates (The torii) is not red. It is of its own color, between red and
orange. I see it is often translated into "vermillon", which, let's admit, we
would just call red.

So is it possible that in the distant past, a civilization would consider dark
red and dark blue the same color? That instead of one "blue" category they
would mix several other unnamed colors?

I can believe it. I think most civilizations will differentiate between the
color of the blood and the color of vegetation but apart from that, I can
imagine a very different palette.

And while I consider it unlikely just given the elements we have, let's not be
totally closed to the possibility that the biological color perception changed
since then. Arguably, nowadays, color-blindness is a bigger handicap than a
slight myopia. It hinders you in several artistic or design-oriented careers.
Even had a classmate struggling with resistors color code (in the good old
days of the DIP components). Myopia will just be a problem for pilots and is
easily corrected. Has it been the case for long enough to apply a selective
pressure? I doubt it but am opened to being proven wrong.

~~~
lqet
> But would you call the green light blue? Because I know some Japanese who do

But that was not my point. Obviously, color categories are not fixed and may
differ from culture to culture, yet you still know that "wine" (classified as
red in western culture) has a different color than a traffic light. It does
not matter that Japanese would call the green light blue, the same color they
would (probably) say a clear summer sky has, because just like you would
recognize that a red traffic light has a different color than red wine,
Japanese would recognize that a clear-blue sky has a different color than a
"blue" traffic light.

Every time this color discussion comes up, I am surprised people find this so
interesting. Of course there are different names for different things in
different languages / cultures. Of course these names often have a wider or a
narrower set of semantic meaning than in your native language / culture, and
this will of course lead to some "strange" word / concept / category overlap.
But this is just unavoidable if unrelated groups of people build a categorical
representation of a continuous world in their brains.

If you have ever tried to learn a single foreign language, you instinctively
know this, and these color category differences shouldn't come as any surprise
to you.

~~~
Iv
I have learned French (native) then English and German without encountering
that problem. My exposure to Japan is the first time that brought this up. I
think it is not a very common knowledge.

And especially coming from a culture where some colors seem to be labeled as
"objective" categories (we learn at school that magenta, yellow, cyan, are the
core colors. Tech people learn the same for red green and blue) it is strange
at first to realize that some cultures do not consider these categories so
clear-cut.

~~~
wirrbel
These are all languages from the same spot n earth with lots of cultural
exchange. I am not very surprised that you didn't encounter drastic
differences.

I think though there are tiny ones that are interesting.

German "blaues Auge" \- (blue eye) is a black eye in English (like one after a
bar fight). This is because blue is associated with sadness in English and
blue eyes (correct me if I am wrong, not an English native) are sad eyes. Blue
in German is however rather overloaded with being drunk. And the blue eye
doesn't seem to conflict with that. "Blau machen" is to call in sick to work
while actually not being sick.

So who knows what associations were made with wine color? Maybe the lack of
control, similar to being drunk..

For red, orange and yellow I think there is large variance in how people would
classify a given color that is not really red or really yellow.

\-------------

My personal guess would be that I could believe that Greeks did not really
have a name for blue. I'd say it is implausible that they were biologically
incapable of differentiating things, but it may just have been a different
shade to them.

~~~
tempguy9999
Bruises can be blue, also black. I don't see a problem.

Also I came across a study that suggested primary colours were distinct and
absolute categories (not relative). They put babies in front of various
colours and measured how long their attention was on the colour. Primary
colours got more attention, from this they deduced what we called primaries
were perceived as having a common reality. I can't find the study so this
paragraph is an FYI, sorry.

------
jowday
Reminds me of Gene Wolfe's use of language in Book of the New Sun. BOTNS is
set on a far-future dying earth, and (unreliably) narrated by the protagonist
Severian and translated into contemporary English.

Close readings reveal dramatic differences between the book's setting and our
world that aren't at all apparent if you rush through the books. The
protagonist refers to his pet as a dog, but reading his descriptions of the
creature closely you might realize his definition of a dog is very different
from our own. At another point in the story, the protagonist has a vision of a
blue sky and describes it as incomprehensibly bright, indicating that the sun
has dimmed and the planet is stuck in a sort of perpetual twilight.

Once the reader notices these things, they might start to realize just how
different the setting of the book is. Suddenly everything in the text is open
to interpretation. At one point you realize that people who operate spaceships
in this setting are referred to as sailors. Does that mean all of the other
'sailors' that Severian encountered previously are actually interstellar
travelers? What about the character who spoke with a sailor's accent? Was that
horse that Severian rode an actual horse, or some far-future alien analog?
Many of these moments are very brief and easy to miss - the book doesn't take
time to explain or emphasize this divergent use of language. You can read this
book over and over and still get something new out of it.

~~~
Slenth
One of my favorite moments in this book that brought this concept to light for
me, is when Severian describes a painting of a knight in a desert wearing a
featureless orange helm. It's a painting of an astronaut on the moon.

~~~
akanet
Or, even more in the spirit of the GP, is it a photograph that Severian
_calls_ a painting because he's never seen a photograph?

------
rainydaybook
What's odd is that there are many instances of odd use of color in
descriptions but there is no normal (to us) usage, and from what I've read the
same applies to other ancient sources. Honey is green (in Homer), but there's
no green trees, green leaves, grass, etc; there is no blue sky or blue sea.
The linguistic analysis of when separate colors were introduce into languages
also shows they were added at very different times. William Gladstone wasn't
very careful in his phrasing when he wrote on the topic and so it from the
start got a bit of a reputation of a crazed theory, but there is something odd
about the whole thing. I think it's not resolved because serious researches
familiar with ancient egyptian and sumerian languages don't find this
interesting enough to research it? Perhaps there's too few of them and too
many other, more important and unresolved questions?

------
pavlov
Isn’t “wine dark” used in Homer to describe the sea at dawn? I’ve associated
it to mean dark with a hint of purple from the rising sun — not literally
ruby-colored.

It seems odd that English-speaking people would get overly literal about this
expression when English itself is full of similar exaggerative coloring:
someone “ashen-faced” is presumably not light gray and devoid of hue all over
their skin, etc.

~~~
DFHippie
I think phrases like "yellow dog", "red cow", and "bluegrass" make sense if
you understand them to mean relatively yellow, red, or blue. That is, a yellow
dog is a dog that is yellow for a dog. A red cow is redder than you expect a
cow to be even if relative to a bird, say, it is brown.

I don't know how you go from here to green honey, though.

~~~
simonh
I’d want to know why we are translating that word to mean green? Is is used to
describe other green things, if so What? Did they have a word for yellow, and
if so what was that used to describe?

~~~
ars
You are correct, the word that is today translated as green "Yarok" meant
yellow in those days.

It is used to describe gold and an egg:
[http://www.balashon.com/2006/08/yarok.html?m=1](http://www.balashon.com/2006/08/yarok.html?m=1)

The language shifted not the color.

------
Tharkun
I can recommend the book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks
Different in Other Languages" to anyone interested in this sort of stuff.

------
tony_cannistra
Man, one of the teachers who has made the most significant impact upon me was
my middle school Latin teacher back in Providence (we translated Homer from
Latin). She had such a passion for the language, and for idioms like this,
that it was infectious, even to a bunch of shithead middle schoolers. I still
get a little pang of excitement when I read this phrase, such was the drama of
translating the Iliad. Word-for-word it was an adventure.

~~~
DFHippie
> we translated Homer from Latin

Maybe you mean Horace? Homer wrote in Greek. It seems like if you were going
to translate a Latin epic you'd go for the Aeneid.

~~~
tony_cannistra
Yeah, I realize. Perhaps we just read Homer in English. Either way,
translating epics like the Aeneid was thrilling.

------
radamadah
I know researchers have found how the ancient Greeks used to paint their
sculptures, and that they used blue, green, and red as separate colors
([https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-
colors-1788...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-
colors-17888/)).

I always considered that phrase in Homer as a poetic flourish, or maybe just
something that was a figure of speech in his time period.

~~~
romaaeterna
Yes, the ancient Greeks knew about the color blue, as do most old world
primates. Here is an linguistic explanation of color language around the
world:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg)

The sculpture reconstructions you've linked are rather imaginative -- German
grad students with UV lights, not chemical reconstructions -- and are probably
only vaguely like the original colors. Where original colors have actually
survived, in frescoes, etc., the ancients display a reasonable eye for beauty
in color.

~~~
olah_1
>the ancients display a reasonable eye for beauty in color.

And yet, the reconstructions there are reminiscent of Indian religious art
today. Do Indians not have a reasonable eye for beauty in color?

------
michaericalribo
Then there are the Homeric epithets, which recur and are believed to be a
mnemonic device...so "wine-dark sea" is not only a descriptor, but an anchor
to remember the surrounding verse.

I believe this was a 20th-century discovery, no less, and even "ancient" texts
have dimensions that are easily overlooked

~~~
lsb
It's a "formula". Kleos aphthiton I think was the first discovery, back in the
1790s, that's etymologically equivalent to sravas aksitam in the Sanskrit
(hence, they are from an Indo-European language family), but you're dead on,
it was only in the 1930s or so Milman and Parry documented oral composition of
stories in Eastern Europe, with tape recorders of the time iirc

The Cal Watkins book "How To Kill A Dragon" is superb for a discussion of
formulae in Indo-European languages

------
googleanalytics
[https://medium.com/@skallasp/homers-wine-dark-sea-
faq-15004a...](https://medium.com/@skallasp/homers-wine-dark-sea-
faq-15004acbccca)

~~~
klez
Great read, but I take issue with a passage unrelated to the issue at hand

> This would explain the obsession with mixing wine and water when it is is
> unheard of today.

In Italy we still mix water with wine, especially when drinking during a meal.
It's not like we do this all the time, but it's a thing.

------
bhaak
One of the proposed explanations is that the ancient Greeks didn't have a
fully developed mental model of colors and used them more along on a
light/dark axis than dividing the colors into strictly separate color terms
(also remember that bright pure colors weren't a thing).

I can relate to this idea as my memories are not filled with vivid colors.
They are also not completely colorless as I remember there being colors but
pinpointing what color certain objects had is sometimes difficult if the color
was not a significant property of the object.

For example, remembering/picturing that grass is green is not a problem. Or
that the sea at the beach was of a vivid blue because this was the memorable
impression. But remembering which exact color the dress somebody was wearing
had, this might be difficult. I'll remembering that it was a brightly colored
dress and therefore will be "seeing" in my mind a bright dress that is
colored, but without "seeing" a specific color but also "seeing" it with some
excluded colors (like dark gray, brown, jeans blue) that are not bright.

It might be significant that Homer's stories were told for a relatively long
time before they were written down. Oral poetry has other requirements than
written poetry as you have to keep everything in memory and can't rely on an
external source.

~~~
DFHippie
Another thing to keep in mind is that until the advent of dyes most things
were just their natural color. You don't need a separate word for green if
unexpected things are never green. And even if they sometimes are, you can
just say that the unexpected thing has the same color as something you expect
to be green.

~~~
pvg
Curiously enough, people now think ancient Greek statues and architecture were
painted in (if reconstructions are to be believed) rather vivid colours.

~~~
petjuh
Those statues are from a later period than Homer. Not saying that they didn't
have access to dyes during his time, though.

------
samirillian
I remember that "On the Sublime" references the phrase wine-dark, and
considers it prototypically sublime. I think the metaphor is inherently
mysterious, as all good metaphors are.

c.f.,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sublime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sublime)

edit - found the passage

How unlike to this the expression which is used of Sorrow by Hesiod, if indeed
the Shield is to be attributed to Hesiod:

Rheum from her nostrils was trickling. (Shield of Heracles 267)

The image he has suggested is not terrible but rather loathsome. Contrast the
way in which Homer magnifies the higher powers:

And far as a man with his eyes through the sea-line haze may discern,

On a cliff as he sitteth and gazeth away o’er the wine-dark deep,

So far at a bound do the loud-neighing steeds of the Deathless leap. (Iliad 5.
770)

He makes the vastness of the world the measure of their leap. The sublimity is
so overpowering as naturally to prompt the exclamation that if the divine
steeds were to leap thus twice in succession they would pass beyond the
confines of the world.

------
fpoling
There were interesting tweets a year ago that perhaps ancients did have words
for blue,

[https://twitter.com/search?q=blue%20(from%3APaulSkallas)%20u...](https://twitter.com/search?q=blue%20\(from%3APaulSkallas\)%20until%3A2018-07-15%20since%3A2018-05-01&src=typed_query)

------
jrumbut
I will recommend, as I have before, the Lattimore translation of the Iliad
which leaves in the wine dark sea, wine dark oxen, winged words (my favorite
Homerism), and glancing eyed helmets.

It preserves the fact that you are reading something that comes from a world
no one alive today truly understands, even at a vocabulary level.

------
glamp
For anyone interested in more on this, Radiolab did a really good episode on
colors which includes a bit about Homer:
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/211119-colors](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/211119-colors)

------
steanne
related:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms)

~~~
dmix
Green/Yellow are grouped together which explains the description of Honey as
yellow in the greek text...

------
chx
I can wholeheartedly recommend the book Wikipedia mentions Deutscher, Guy (Aug
4, 2016). Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other
Languages. Random House.

------
petjuh
Perhaps people didn't need a word for blue because they could say "the color
of sky". For example the English word "green" comes from "grow" in PIE,
meaning "the color of (plant) growth".

Even "yellow" comes from "grow" although the sound changes there are
significant enough that it's not as obvious as "green" is.

------
bladedtoys
Even between closely related cultures using the same language, there are color
differences. Even though both the British and Americans have the words "pink",
"magenta" and "purple", the British use the word "pink" over a larger range
that includes colors most Americans would call "purple" or "magenta".

------
shredprez
Every time this wanders across the front page of HN, I wonder:

What are the chances this is more a description of the murkiness or opacity of
a dark sea (compared to water near the shore) rather than the literal color of
the water?

~~~
gradstudent
This comment should be higher. That a poet should want to compare the
viscosity and opacity of the sea to wine is a much more simple explanation --
and to my mind much more likely -- than exotic theories to explain why ancient
Greeks didn't have the colour blue.

~~~
odyssey7
And the blue-was-perceived-differently theory has so much other evidence for
it that is compelling besides this one metaphor. It's a beautiful choice of
words that inspire, but people put too much weight on it as a riddle that can
be or has been cracked.

------
jorblumesea
The article cited by wikipedia as a source is really good:
[https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-
sea](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea)

------
denkmoon
Tribal societies not having a word for blue is fascinating. How do they
describe the colour of the open sky??

Blue pigments are quite rare in nature, but seeing the open sky has to be a
universal human experience.

~~~
ars
They did have a word for blue, for example
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet)

------
ncmncm
Cultures with few color words are, generally, those without paints to choose
among. You just don't need any particular precision about colors if you don't
need to make decisions about them.

People from cultures we like to call "primitive" are routinely astonished at
how blind most of us are to critical distinctions in their world. Imagine, we
have only one kind of uncle! "We" doesn't say whether the listener is
included, or whether the group are all blood relatives. There's no end to this
stuff, including in ancient Greek, so quibbling about color distinctions when
we have to wash out so much to translate is distinctly ... hick.

~~~
egdod
We might not have a particular word to call out those distinctions, but
they’re hardly mysterious. They can be described in a couple or a few words,
and everybody would understand. They just aren’t considered important enough
to warrant a dedicated word.

Not drawing a distinction between blue and dark, however, is quite alien. And
there isn’t anything hick about admitting that.

~~~
ncmncm
There is, about insisting on it. Especially since the Greek in question says
nothing about "dark" or about "blue".

------
Kecelij
Taleb writes about this extensively in his Antifragile.

------
awinter-py
wine-face = smooth surface? texture not color?

