The Mystery of Homer’s “Wine-Dark Sea”

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Reading From Homer, 1885. Philadelphia Museum of Art

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Anyone who’s visited the Greek islands recalls a luminous world suspended between blue sky and blue sea. Yet as early as 1858, William Gladstone—British politician and amateur classics scholar—noticed a remarkable fact: Homer (or whoever wrote the Iliad and Odyssey) almost never described anything as blue.

The poet’s signature turn of phrase is “wine-dark sea.” That trope occurs five times in the Iliad and twelve times in the Odyssey. A sea the color of burgundy? Or maybe the color of so-called white wine?

Homer's phrase (oînops póntos) literally translates as “wine-face sea” or “wine-eye sea.” It’s an idiom, untranslatable as such things are. It must mean a sea like wine, but in what sense? Gladstone’s theory was that the archaic Greeks used color terms to describe luminance, not hue. A deep blue sea can look as dark as red wine (though not red).

What did Homer say was blue? The eyebrows of Zeus! Homer uses the Greek word kyanós for that description. It could be a playful figure of speech, like “blue-haired lady.” However, scholars think it's more likely that the meaning of kyanós has shifted over time. It means blue in modern Greek, but in Homer’s time it perhaps meant only dark.

Gladstone’s observation has inspired multidisciplinary research on the fraught connection of color and culture. Start with the obvious question: How could the ancient Greeks not have had a proper word for blue?

Those who remember their Western Lit 101 may already be thinking of one explanation: Homer was blind. Naturally, colors would not have been a big part of his poetic imagination. When Homer did speak of the color of the sea or Zeus’ eyebrows, his descriptions may have been a little off…

The trouble is that Homer is a semi-mythic figure and probably not the sole author of the works ascribed to him. In any case, the mystery of ancient color names transcends Homer and Greece. In the 1960s, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay demonstrated that ancient languages around the globe were deficient in color terms. The pattern, they claimed, was for languages to begin with terms for light and dark and then to add words for hues. The first named hue would be red, followed by other primary and secondary colors. Terms like brown and pink come relatively late in a language’s development.

We see this pattern in English. As you may have heard, the English word orange derives from the citrus fruit and not vice-versa. In Old English, geoluhread (yellow-red) describes the color we now call orange. One of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has a fox of a color “betwixe yellow and reed.”

Portuguese traders brought oranges from India to Europe in the early 1500s. Shakespeare mentions oranges three times. He twice uses “orange tawny” to describe a color. Tawny was then a common word for brown, and this is probably to be understood as a noun modifying a color adjective, like today’s “lemon yellow” or “tomato red.”

It wasn’t until the early 1600s that orange begins to appear as a color name independent of the fruit. Isaac Newton helped to clinch that usage when, reporting on his prism experiments in Opticks (1704), he listed the seven colors of the spectrum. Orange was one of them.

Newton’s work established color as a physical property of light. This finding dominates the modern conception of color. A red apple’s color is an objective fact, a matter of photons of certain wavelengths. The redness is out there in the world and not just in our heads. Yet this view has been challenged by some recent experiments in color perception. I’ll say more on that in a future post.