English speakers are pretty confusing talking about the clarity of liquids. Often colorless, clear liquids are called "white" (like white rum). Transparent brown liquids (whiskey) some people will say are not "clear", which they reserve for the colorless liquids. There's a word "limpid" which might be useful though definitions sometimes mean just transparent or both transparent and colorless.
The author suggests it's something like the clarity that Homer was observing and that's been my assumption for a while. It's unsurprising that we're confused what the word might've meant, given how imprecise we are about similar topics.
This is how I took it, as an American English speaker even without context. 'Wine Dark', I assume it's referring to something with the about the opacity and perhaps brightness of wine. If dark were removed, I may then think of wine colored.
A lot of words spent on the ocean. None on wine and the practicalities of epic verse.
The thing to understand here is that the ancient people who would have heard these words from a poet did not drink wine as we understand it.
Wine was a concentrated product added to water for consumption. This did a few things, but the important ones are condense calories, make the water safe to drink, and the concentrated wine product was easier to store and ship. Wine dark means this stuff.
We think of epic poetry as some kind of high literature. They were more like Marvel movies of the day. Wine dark is not a fanciful metaphor, but rather something the audience understood and fit into the meter.
Homeric verse had to fit into dactylic hexameter. Easy phrases are sprinkled throughout Epic poetry that make the scantion work out. Wine-dark sea is one of them. Swift-footed Achilles and Rosy-fingered dawn are some other notable examples.
These phrases are used when it makes no sense. The Iliad talks about Swift footed Achilles sitting down, so arguments that meter isn’t determining turns of phrase is simply wrong. It’s just an epithet that fit into the scantion.
These are really long poems that were recited, from memory to audiences. Memory was their primary storage. So there are a lot of “go-to” easy phrases that are really just vamping, but since it’s thousands of years old we want it to mean more.
Indeed. Moreover, I'm not (so) ancient and the words made sense to me instantly with no dissonance. Deep sea is purple and dark. Some wines are also purple-leaning. The association is very obvious unless you insist in "wines are red, seas are blue" or you come to analyze verses with a spectrometer.
That’s hard a lot of this is knowledge from my Classics days.
There are other theories about Homeric verse. Scholars are pretty sure about formulaic composition explaining some features of Homer. It passes the sniff test and is a simple explanation to a lot of artifacts in the Homeric texts. Some analysis of Homer is misguided since it wasn’t made as a written work. This isn’t a universal belief among scholars today afaik, but it’s a defensible position.
Myself I have never understood why the debate. Oceans can appear to be very dark on cloudy stormy days, and the sky can be red, giving an impression of a wine like colour, or at least wine in a container.
What is more interesting is that is was not until the 1850s people started to debate the description. So for nearly 2500 years nobody seems to have thought twice about it.
I would also note that they may have mixed different varieties of grapes, used different materials for containers, mixed water and anything else they felt like mixing in with it, and stored their wine in different conditions than are common today. It probably wasn't very well strained either, compared to today's wine.
If you look at "natural wines" available now you'll see they are all kinds of colors. If you look at the sea in different circumstances it will be different colors.
I suspect the reason this becomes a problem for modern readers is that we became used to drinking unadulterated wines from crystal clear glasses. My guess is that to an ancient Greek, the color of wine was less a fixed point and more of a spectrum.
Yeah. As someone who grew up around the sea and loves Homer I always loved this description and it never seemed remotely strange to me. If you've ever seen the sea as the sun rises or sets it can seem almost syrupy and dark like a Burgundy even on a clear day. Likewise in cloudy days or during storms it can get very dark also.
And as you point out they would have been looking at wine in a cup (without transparent sides) so it would have just looked dark most of the time rather than particularly red.
The part that everyone wonders, but can't bring themselves to say aloud for risk of sounding silly, is this:
Could the mode of thought of the ancients have been so alien to us, that (at least some aspects of) their minds are no longer comprehensible?
This isn't, after all, the only example of it. Jayne himself posited that a few millennia ago, everyone was some sort of schizoid puppets, lacking the capacity to have a will of their own.
This might not even be the sum of it. If they could be so alien, and thought in ways now incomprehensible to us, why then might it not be so that we too suffer similarly irrational ideation? Are there things important to us beyond reason, that seem to make all the sense in the world now?
Crazy talk. Stupidity. Incoherent ramblings. But that's why everyone wonders such silently, hoping the other guy will take the bait and suggest it...
I would like to follow up on what "incomprehensible" mean in that case.
Understanding another person can be a range of things. Attributing coherent motives for observed action might be on the one end of the scale. Feeling exactly what they are feeling might be on the other.
Even for other people today it can be hard to bridge that gap. We can imagine ourselves in their positions, trying to feel what they are feeling. Some dimension of their inner life will doubtlessly escape us.
However even with the ancients, we can in most cases understand why they did what they did. People are puzzled by details like the "wine-dark sea" exactly because they understand many other parts of the Iliad and Odyssey quite well.
There are about 90 generations separating us from Homer. Quite a lot changed in that time, but these are mostly humans like ourselves and we can relate to them ok.
Also for Julian Jaynes, "schizoid puppet" is a bit over-dramatized for his (theorized) lack of self-awareness in Bronze Age or older people, for context, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
I read the book a few years back. It was far more out there than any of the summaries I'd read of it years prior. Chapter after chapter, he made the case that no one in the ancient world ever used a word that indicated they had any will of their own. That they never had epiphanies or insights or even true thoughts.
That when they did act, it was a big booming voice inside their head that they took to be the voices of various gods and deities, guiding them through life via micromanagement.
The wikipedia article does not really do it justice.
I wish I could dismiss it as woowoo nonsense. But far more recently, there are credible reports of circumstances where because a bunch of people were dancing, those who came near them and noticed started dancing uncontrollably themselves, for days on end. Some even dying of exhaustion.
The software that is the human mind is buggy as shit, easily put into bad states, and networked enough that glitches are apparently contagious.
The Bicameral Mind really is a fascinating theory. I wish there was more evidence for or against it either way. The absence of text on free will does not really convince me, because there might be a number of reasons for that and there is not much text anyway for the bronze age and earlier. But it sure would explain all kinds of religious experiences and texts, so who knows.
Surely the difference between modern people and ancient Greeks is just a matter of culture. We can understand ideas from other cultures today. Why would it be any different trying to understand ancient thoughts? I think it’s more likely we are just missing some context.
Surely. I doubt there are any significant biological differences going back even tens of thousands.
But that just makes it weirder. If culture alone lets you see colors differently... then what other basic, fundamental experiences are subject to being so wildly different?
> The part that everyone wonders, but can't bring themselves to say aloud for risk of sounding silly, is this:
> Could the mode of thought of the ancients have been so alien to us, that (at least some aspects of) their minds are no longer comprehensible?
While it's an interesting question — I find myself musing on what it might mean for some thought to be literally un-thinkable for some specific human — I think most people have the opposite problem.
> Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969; ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms for black/dark and white/bright. If a culture has three color terms, the third is red. If a culture has four, it has either yellow or green.
> Berlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:
>
> All languages contain terms for black and white.
> If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
> If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
> If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
> If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
> If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
> If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.
Berlin & Kay were basically repeating research which had already been done decades before, but forgotten. Guy Deutscher's book _Through the Language Glass_ covers both the linguistics and the history of the research. It's a fascinating walk through the human brain and through the history of ideas. Highly recommended.
It's worth noting that the ancient Greeks usually watered their wine (and indeed frowned upon those barbarians like the Macedonians who drank it unadulterated). I've always thought this line was more about how some water you could see through (to the bottom perhaps) and some you could not - unwatered wine is opaque, and the open sea hides what's below (and indeed beyond).
There are places in Greece where the water is so clear and still you cannot even tell that it is there. I myself have been to Greek beaches where you look at your feet, and you can not tell where the water starts.
Not an issue when you're looking almost 90 degrees down at your feet.
I might have a video of me slowly moving my finger down, the eye absolutely could not tell when it would hit water and it looked like there was no water. I'll see if I did in fact make the video, I certainly wanted to.
I've been reading Caroline Alexander's translation of the Iliad (she's the author of this article) and have been tremendously impressed. It's apparently at least as accurate as Lattimore (the academic standard) but so much more vivid. Scenes jump off of the page. They're also academically rigorous, important if like me you're interested in subtle meaning in Homeric epic. Highly recommended.
> So for example, a typical translation might use a phrase like “Fear filled Agamemnon’s mind”. Wrong! There is no word for “mind” in the Iliad, except maybe in the very newest interpolations. The words are things like kardia, noos, phrenes, and thumos, which Jaynes translates as heart, vision/perception, belly, and sympathetic nervous system, respectively. He might translate the sentence about Agamemnon to say something like “Quivering rose in Agamemnon’s belly”. It still means the same thing – Agamemnon is afraid – but it’s how you would talk about it if you didn’t have an idea of “the mind” as the place where mental things happened – you would just notice your belly was quivering more. Later, when the Greeks got theory of mind, they repurposed all these terms. You can still find signs of this today, like how we say “I believe it in my heart”.
Of course it's possible that Jaynes is simply wrong, and the Greeks did have a concept of the mind, and a translation that talks about the mind is genuinely more faithful than one that does not.
It's an overly literal and reductive claim in the first place. There are places where homer clearly uses nous to indicate the "inner workings" of someone's reasoning and planning, separate and different from the actions they take. I can't find a quote right now but look at how misdirection and dishonesty are represented in homer, you'll find some examples of what I'm talking about.
They may not have had an explicit concept of a unified entity containing all of reason, imagination, sense perception, and morality, the way we think of the mind now. But they did have an understanding of these processes and an experience of them being interrelated.
And also remember that "ancient greece" was a period spanning like a thousand years with hugely varying degrees of cultural and linguistic homogeneity over that period. Scholars of antiquity are very careful about qualifying their claims as to who and when they apply. It's notable that Alexander doesn't take that care.
We have a ton of information about how certain philosophers thought at a certain time. But their focus is narrowly technical, they're as much defining their jargon than they are describing how words are used and understood broadly among greeks. We should be careful not to absorb their confidence into our understanding.
A very quick reply. Yes, I've read Julian Jaynes also, and have thought like you are thinking now. However I'm not sure how one would translate noos -- head? thoughts? feelings? Consider also that French, for example, has no word for "mind" and yet translators clearly don't shy from the word. Now this is different of course, if the point is that the Homeric Greeks didn't have the same idea of consciousness, but I think that idea can come through without ridding oneself of words like "mind." Maybe you'd prefer a word like "perception," but that introduces another burst of unhelpful associations, not least of which is its scientific and precise-sounding tone? Finally, when I read Homer, it seems clear that many characters do have, shall we say, internal deliberations, and that Homer is clear about this. So I tend to feel that Jaynes' interpretations might be best seen as tentative and unfinished.
Every once in a while this goofy idea comes up and I don't know why. I live in Florida and I often see a sea that looks very much like red wine (which itself isn't, you know, red)
I don’t know what they have in mind, but the Atlantic can look dark pink or purple at sunset and sunrise.
Really dark purple wine can start to look bluish in the right environment, which could remind someone of a dark ocean on a cloudy day.
I’ve never lived near the Atlantic, only visited periodically, so probably unaware of the full spectrum of its appearance. I’ve had a lot of wine, though.
Same with the Mediterranean. I was puttering around Cinque Terre in a small motorboat at sunset some years back, and Homer’s epithet immediately came to mind.
There, the deep, dark sea contrasts even more starkly with the bright, crystal-clear waters along the shore. I suspect this was the distinction Homer was after, rather than trying to describe the specific hue for an audience that was likely closely familiar with the appearance of the sea to begin with.
Interesting article, but the concept of 'drowning one's sorrows in a cup of wine' in relation to 'the wine-dark sea' is the kind of thing a poet would come up with. The texts seem to bear this out:
> "And now have I put in here, as thou seest, with ship and crew, while sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech, on my way to Temese for copper..."
> "Nay, if thou wilt, go and ask the old warrior Laertes, who, they say, comes no more to the city, but afar in the fields suffers woes attended by an aged woman as his handmaid, who sets before him food and drink, after weariness has laid hold of his limbs, as he creeps along the slope of his vineyard plot..."
> "What feast, what throng is this? What need hast thou of it? Is it a drinking bout, or a wedding feast?"
It could just be a literary device used to invoke the effects of alcohol in the context of setting sail on an ocean, on a dangerous journey from which the voyager may not return.
I was on the island of Malta, and under certain lighting condition the blue color in sea disappears and it becomes almost purple, very dark too. Not an exact impression, but a tentative hue that made me recall "wine-dark" phrase.
Women are depicted as white on Greek pottery and referred to as white in Greek poetry for the obvious reason that women have lighter skin than men do.
The sea is something completely different, and the darkness isn't a power reference anyway. Men are not called "dark" because they're stronger than women; they're called that because they're darker than women. And, as the article notes, the sea isn't called "dark" at all. "Dark" was a suggestion introduced in the 19th century by the standard classical Greek dictionary.
Regardless of the actual merit of the alkali theory, the color shifts of anthocyanins (like those found in grapes and berries) when they change PH is striking. They turn from these almost bloody hues into brilliant azures.
If you like this kind of stuff then you might like Ink gin which changes colour when you add tonic. (https://www.inkgin.com/ - no commercial connection here, I've just enjoyed some of their products. :)
In the game Final Fantasy VI, the second world has a permanent sunset, and the sea is a very believable red wine color. I don't know the context for time of day, but if it's twilight, it seems plausible.
The phrase in the original homeric greek is "οίνωψ πόντος". "οίνωψ" is a combination of "οίνος" = wine, and ωψ = "view/look" (related to the modern όψη). So it's not wine-"colored", per se, but it is specified to be "wine-like", specifically in a visual sense. to be fair, this could be other qualities than color, e.g. as others mentioned, perhaps opaqueness.
If it means how "wine appears to the eye", could that also mean how appealing, or repulsive it is?
I don't know or remember what is the context in the original, but for example, a sea that is so calm that it is inviting to travel, or deceptively calm, but if you travel long enough, maybe you will be lost, passing out, going mad or getting destroyed?
I've always wondered if people are misinterpreting wine-dark as wine-colored, when it is the "dark" that is important in description. If wanted to describe dark blue sea, calling it wine-dark to emphasize its darkness would make sense.
There are a number of things to take into account.
For example, we don't know how exactly the wide looked like in the 8th century B.C.E. as the wine making process has changed a lot since then. I am not talking about the color but also its hue.
The author suggests it's something like the clarity that Homer was observing and that's been my assumption for a while. It's unsurprising that we're confused what the word might've meant, given how imprecise we are about similar topics.