This Wine-Dark Sea has Haunted Many Imaginations
May 2, 2023 1:05 AM Subscribe
So what color is the sea? Silver-pewter at dawn; gray, gray-blue, green-blue, or blue depending on the particular day; yellow or red at sunset; silver-black at dusk; black at night. In other words, no color at all, but rather a phenomenon of reflected light. The phrase “winelike,” then, had little to do with color but must have evoked some attribute of dark wine that would resonate with an audience familiar with the sea—with the póntos, the high sea, that perilous path to distant shores—such as the glint of surface light on impenetrable darkness, like wine in a terracotta vessel. from A Winelike Sea by Caroline Alexander [Lapham's; ungated]
I really love Alexander’s essay. Another interpretation I like of the color of the sea in Homer is by William Harris, who engaged in some light antiquities theft to examine the way ancient Greeks thought of color. Excerpt:
posted by Kattullus at 4:18 AM on May 2, 2023 [14 favorites]
The purple dye which has been used since antiquity as the mark of wealth and lavish opulence, is so well known that it virtually signifies "royalty" and the trappings of kings of the realm. The Greeks obtained it, drop by drop, squeezed from the mollusks Murex Trunculus and Purpura Haemastoma which are found along the eastern Mediterranean shores near Tyre, whence the common name Tyrian Purple.Prof. Harris’ archived faculty page is worth a perusal, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
The color is striking, once seen is it hard to forget or confuse with any other hue. A similar murex is found in the Caribbean waters, and the dye is often used to trim Mexican basketware, found in shops and yard sales throughout the States. I can vouch for the similarity of color between the modern Mexican and ancient Mediterranean samples, for a curious personal reason. Years ago when visiting Crete, I stopped at the small museum at Chanea at western end of the island, and noticed a jar which has a crust of bright purple around the mouth. A small bit had fallen off which I picked up and put in my wallet, years later I held this up against a sample of Mexican basketware and the color was an exact match. The New World murex is larger and yields more colorant, but the hue of its material is identical with my ancient sample.
But back in Greece, I remembered Homer's striking figure of the "purple sea" (porphurea thalassa), which had always puzzled me as a student. And equally odd was his "purple blood" gushing forth, and even a "purple rainbow" mentioned once in the Iliad. Our sense of the color "purple" does not fit these uses, it was clear to me even then that something was wrong with our color-sense, or that colors can shift as part of the process of social evolution. Yet all these three uses are by the same author and the identical time-frame, so I left Greece that summer puzzled and intrigued.
About that time a well known scholar tendered the opinion that "porphureos", which was used by Aeschylus in the gory death scene in which Clytemnestra hacked open her husband' s head so that the "purple blood" gushed forth. A late Byzantine glossator had suggested that blood when dried was a darkish brown, and the bookish Classicist followed his late source without hesitation. But that led to worse problems, for how could Homer's sea be brownish, or a rainbow be rusty?
Before leaving Greece I held up my micro-sample one day at eye level and sighted beyond it to that wonderful Mediterranean sea. I saw right off that both the flake and the sea were iridescent, it was that quality of inner shinning-ness which has made the Mediterranean waters so famous to century after century. And the Murex had somehow chanced upon the same iridescence, so it was the relative scale of iridescence which was behind these word-usages.
posted by Kattullus at 4:18 AM on May 2, 2023 [14 favorites]
What a wonderful article, thank you for sharing it. When I was learning ancient Greek at school in the 1990s (it was one of those schools), we unquestioningly translated this as wine-dark. We were using Liddell and Scott lexicons and I still have mine sitting on the shelf behind me right now. I do remember my teacher discussing with us what Homer meant, and Gladstone's theories about colour blindness being mentioned. Funny how the English public school curriculum hadn't moved on much in a century... although I think we did also discuss more metaphorical potential meanings. But I hadn't ever stopped to think that the components of the word don't literally mean that.
posted by greycap at 4:18 AM on May 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by greycap at 4:18 AM on May 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
Useful discussion of an intractable puzzle. What worries me is this: at least it’s fairly obvious there’s something wrong with our understanding of Ancient Greek color words. What if there are other areas which seem to make perfect sense, but which in fact we’ve quietly got all wrong?
posted by Phanx at 4:26 AM on May 2, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Phanx at 4:26 AM on May 2, 2023 [5 favorites]
I'm not sure why people get hung up on colour divisions as if they are supposed to be immutable and unchangeable and the same in every language at every time in history. I mean, English and Welsh put the boundary line between blue and green in slightly different places. There hasn't always been a separate word for orange. And we have pink and red, for lighter and brighter reds, but not (unlike Russian) separate basic words for lighter and darker blues.
posted by plonkee at 5:09 AM on May 2, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by plonkee at 5:09 AM on May 2, 2023 [8 favorites]
Centuries hence, I imagine scholars arguing furiously over whether the poem "roses are red, violets are blue" constitutes proof that for some reason we were all incapable of seeing that violets are violet.
posted by kyrademon at 5:12 AM on May 2, 2023 [18 favorites]
posted by kyrademon at 5:12 AM on May 2, 2023 [18 favorites]
I've read this before... I'm nearly sure of it. It's very interesting. But ancient Greeks (ancient anybody) wouldn't be used to seeing red wine the way we do anyway. They'd most likely be drinking it out of clay or stoneware cups. Maybe metal or even wood cups. Not perfectly clear glass like we can acquire even at a junk store for less than a dollar. Crystal-clear glass was not common at all.
Also: wine is a dark liquid that most people at the time would be familiar with. It's dark. Probably murky back then, at least sometimes. It's not always a uniform red color, either. We describe things as "coffee colored" today because most people are familiar with coffee, not because we are attributing some elemental, societal or philosophical quality of coffee to the brown thing.
Still it's an interesting read. Thanks.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:31 AM on May 2, 2023 [11 favorites]
Also: wine is a dark liquid that most people at the time would be familiar with. It's dark. Probably murky back then, at least sometimes. It's not always a uniform red color, either. We describe things as "coffee colored" today because most people are familiar with coffee, not because we are attributing some elemental, societal or philosophical quality of coffee to the brown thing.
Still it's an interesting read. Thanks.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:31 AM on May 2, 2023 [11 favorites]
This reminds me, ever since I read this delightful translation of Beowulf, I've been hoping to find equally delightful translations of Homer.
posted by rebent at 5:38 AM on May 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by rebent at 5:38 AM on May 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
Caroline Alexander is a great popularizer of pre-classical Greece, especially Homer. Well, up to a point; I wouldn’t say The War That Killed Achilles is for general audiences, but it’s a good read if you’re willing to put in a little work.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:02 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:02 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
One thing I wish she'd brought out is that the Mycenaean Greeks were great sailors, but not great ocean-goers. They did not commonly sail more than about a day's distance from land--at least, not on purpose! Of course, all sorts of mishaps can happen to you within sight of the shore, but the resonances were different than for, for example, New England whaling towns.
posted by praemunire at 6:48 AM on May 2, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 6:48 AM on May 2, 2023 [3 favorites]
A few thoughts from Pliny the Elder on Rome and wine.
posted by BWA at 6:52 AM on May 2, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by BWA at 6:52 AM on May 2, 2023 [5 favorites]
Then there's that fringe history theory that the Illiad originated with the Celts and they were describing the darker seas of northern Europe, and some of the distances, directions, and river names are curiously similar to ones in England and northern France if you squint. Then the war would have been about control of tin mines so vital to bronze age cultures. This was popularized in Iman Wilkens' book Where Troy Once Stood, which admittedly really goes off the rails into woo-ville at times, especially when he tries to continue the theory into the Odyssey.
posted by indexy at 7:02 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by indexy at 7:02 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
slime-bark tree (disgustingly dribbling arbor)
swine-ark free (pig released from a porker prison schooner)
crime-dark he (worrisome conclusion about boyfriend's background)
sublime fart - wheee! (note passed between school desks)
(Great post, thanks. Now back to editing job)
posted by Jody Tresidder at 7:32 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
swine-ark free (pig released from a porker prison schooner)
crime-dark he (worrisome conclusion about boyfriend's background)
sublime fart - wheee! (note passed between school desks)
(Great post, thanks. Now back to editing job)
posted by Jody Tresidder at 7:32 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
In case you need a soundtrack to the article.
posted by ropeladder at 7:40 AM on May 2, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by ropeladder at 7:40 AM on May 2, 2023 [1 favorite]
Related? Kelly Grovier at BBC on the colour purple [metaprev 2018]. Same author, wider palette at BBC today: "Every colour we encounter in a great work of art, from the ultramarine that Johannes Vermeer wove into the turban of his Girl with a Pearl Earring to the volatile vermillion that inflames the fiery sky of Edvard Munch's The Scream, brings with it an extraordinary backstory".
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:58 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:58 AM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
You are on a wave, chavenet! Thanks for this post. It really got me thinking.
It's fascinating that something that is a translation can lead to so much discussion over generations, it's a bit like with the Bible, where fundamentalists in the US seem to forget that the Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, not the King's English.
In the standard Danish translation of the Iliad up till my high school years it was wine-blue waves, and nobody seemed to worry about that, or make theories about Greek color-perception (even though Goethe was widely read, Gladstone not so much). BTW, as a sign of my age, I still have that Iliad right behind me, because I'm nostalgic, filled with my exam notes. But I can't read it easily anymore, because it is printed with a fraktur font, so I had to find the translation online. Next to it is my Greek primer. Forget about that entirely. Learning Ancient Greek is not at all like riding a bike, you will forget almost everything if you never use it.
I've just read a really interesting (fact-based) novel about the polychromy of Greek sculpture, and it seems pretty clear that the Greeks were quite interested in color, all the way back to archaic times. The linked examples are quite a bit younger than "Homer", whoever that was, but you could also look at Mycenaean art for inspiration, a few centuries before Homer.
Anyway, is the interesting question why Homer didn't use color like we do, or why we put such an emphasis on color? I don't know. I don't know if that difference even exists. Do we write about color in our literature? How many mentions of specific colors are there in a great 20th century novel or poem? I have no idea. I haven't thought about it.
When I see those reconstructions of painted statues, I often think they are too literal, like children's paintings. I imagine a culture with so many talented artists would not have just smeared out a monochrome layer of red or yellow, but would have worked with nuance and shading that has been lost to time. And in the same way, a writer would have preferred poetic and sometimes metaphorical uses of color-words to literal uses. Yes, the sea and sky are often blue in Greece, but they show their temperament and danger in all the other colors, from the darkest black till the palest, almost white grey, and with all the colors of the rainbow in between.
"Katie looked out on the perfect blue sea" is the language of romance novels and advertisers today, maybe it was during the Bronze Age, too?
posted by mumimor at 9:09 AM on May 2, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's fascinating that something that is a translation can lead to so much discussion over generations, it's a bit like with the Bible, where fundamentalists in the US seem to forget that the Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, not the King's English.
In the standard Danish translation of the Iliad up till my high school years it was wine-blue waves, and nobody seemed to worry about that, or make theories about Greek color-perception (even though Goethe was widely read, Gladstone not so much). BTW, as a sign of my age, I still have that Iliad right behind me, because I'm nostalgic, filled with my exam notes. But I can't read it easily anymore, because it is printed with a fraktur font, so I had to find the translation online. Next to it is my Greek primer. Forget about that entirely. Learning Ancient Greek is not at all like riding a bike, you will forget almost everything if you never use it.
I've just read a really interesting (fact-based) novel about the polychromy of Greek sculpture, and it seems pretty clear that the Greeks were quite interested in color, all the way back to archaic times. The linked examples are quite a bit younger than "Homer", whoever that was, but you could also look at Mycenaean art for inspiration, a few centuries before Homer.
Anyway, is the interesting question why Homer didn't use color like we do, or why we put such an emphasis on color? I don't know. I don't know if that difference even exists. Do we write about color in our literature? How many mentions of specific colors are there in a great 20th century novel or poem? I have no idea. I haven't thought about it.
When I see those reconstructions of painted statues, I often think they are too literal, like children's paintings. I imagine a culture with so many talented artists would not have just smeared out a monochrome layer of red or yellow, but would have worked with nuance and shading that has been lost to time. And in the same way, a writer would have preferred poetic and sometimes metaphorical uses of color-words to literal uses. Yes, the sea and sky are often blue in Greece, but they show their temperament and danger in all the other colors, from the darkest black till the palest, almost white grey, and with all the colors of the rainbow in between.
"Katie looked out on the perfect blue sea" is the language of romance novels and advertisers today, maybe it was during the Bronze Age, too?
posted by mumimor at 9:09 AM on May 2, 2023 [3 favorites]
I read a book about classification that asserted all languages have at least three color words: black, white, and red. If they have a fourth, it’s either blue or green; the fifth is the one that isn’t the fourth. Then there’s a trio of colors that are the next three, which I don’t remember. The point is not that people don’t know there are colors; they just don’t have specific words for them, and identify them via objects that are habitually that color.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:02 AM on May 2, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:02 AM on May 2, 2023 [5 favorites]
Interesting GenjiandProust... Poking around the web, it looks like there are some languages which only have black/white or light/dark divisions -- Bassa has ziza (encompassing white, yellow, orange and red) and hui (black, violet, blue, and green); Pirahã has no color terms beyond light and dark, Dani has mili for cool/dark shades such as blue, green, and black, and mola for warm/light colors such as red, yellow, and white.
However, if another color term gets "added" linguistically, the next one seems to tend to be some form of red -- Bambara, for example, has dyema (white, beige), blema (reddish, brownish) and fima (dark green, indigo and black). Then the fourth color term added tends to be yellow or green, then next blue is differentiated from black or from green, and so on.
It seems pretty clear that this is a linguistic and not perceptual issue, though. In Pirahã, if you wanted to describe something as red, you'd just use a term such as "bloodlike", apparently.
posted by kyrademon at 10:39 AM on May 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
However, if another color term gets "added" linguistically, the next one seems to tend to be some form of red -- Bambara, for example, has dyema (white, beige), blema (reddish, brownish) and fima (dark green, indigo and black). Then the fourth color term added tends to be yellow or green, then next blue is differentiated from black or from green, and so on.
It seems pretty clear that this is a linguistic and not perceptual issue, though. In Pirahã, if you wanted to describe something as red, you'd just use a term such as "bloodlike", apparently.
posted by kyrademon at 10:39 AM on May 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
I dunno, I've always found the consternation over the interpretation of "wine-dark/wine-faced sea" harder to understand than the phrase itself. The pronouncement that this imagery is "literally incomprehensible" strikes me more as the kind of self-assured overstatement characteristic of an advanced undergraduate who's starting to get confident with literary analysis than what I'd expect from serious scholars who are actually trying to extract and convey meaning from these texts.
Like, it's imaginative, figurative language. Water is usually light-colored and transparent (but can be dark and semi-opaque). Wine is usually dark and semi-opaque (but can be light-colored and transparent). Nobody pretends that it's confusing when someone says "watery wine" because it implies that the wine is blue! Close your eyes and imagine a dark, stormy seascape. Imagine the sea looks like wine. Is that cRaAaZy? Make it dawn or dusk, if a reddish quality to the light helps your mind's eye. Literary criticism has been known for some pretty out-there claims at times, but to hypothesize that Greeks were congenitally colorblind or literally perceived color differently because a pretty turn of phrase isn't literally true is just bizarre. I suppose it would have been more poetic for Homer to say "Due to the particular atmospheric and lighting conditions, individuals observing the sea perceived it to have a similar Tint, Shade, and Tone to wine (but not, to be clear, a similar Hue, as it was, in fact, water, which as we all know is bluish in Hue, although it could be argued that the violence and menace of the situation in which the water's observers found themselves lent the scene an emotional valence culturally associated with the color red)"
It's a pretty, evocative turn of phrase that worked well and got re-used. Do people's eyes actually "flash" when they're angry? Is "a bear of a man" confusing because men don't have snouts, claws, and thick fur? Or because he's not dark brown, for chrissakes? Bewildering that this has been such a debate for so long.
P.S.: If you're interested in this stuff, check out Amy Clark's earlier research for some very enlightening exploration of the emotional and cultural resonances of color-words being used in non-literal contexts in Old English. (But when I say "enlightening," I don't mean a literal light will shine on you when you read it! That would be silly!)
On preview: Others have articulated my point more eloquently in this thread, but not as angrily. I'll post.
posted by Krawczak at 12:06 PM on May 2, 2023 [13 favorites]
Like, it's imaginative, figurative language. Water is usually light-colored and transparent (but can be dark and semi-opaque). Wine is usually dark and semi-opaque (but can be light-colored and transparent). Nobody pretends that it's confusing when someone says "watery wine" because it implies that the wine is blue! Close your eyes and imagine a dark, stormy seascape. Imagine the sea looks like wine. Is that cRaAaZy? Make it dawn or dusk, if a reddish quality to the light helps your mind's eye. Literary criticism has been known for some pretty out-there claims at times, but to hypothesize that Greeks were congenitally colorblind or literally perceived color differently because a pretty turn of phrase isn't literally true is just bizarre. I suppose it would have been more poetic for Homer to say "Due to the particular atmospheric and lighting conditions, individuals observing the sea perceived it to have a similar Tint, Shade, and Tone to wine (but not, to be clear, a similar Hue, as it was, in fact, water, which as we all know is bluish in Hue, although it could be argued that the violence and menace of the situation in which the water's observers found themselves lent the scene an emotional valence culturally associated with the color red)"
It's a pretty, evocative turn of phrase that worked well and got re-used. Do people's eyes actually "flash" when they're angry? Is "a bear of a man" confusing because men don't have snouts, claws, and thick fur? Or because he's not dark brown, for chrissakes? Bewildering that this has been such a debate for so long.
P.S.: If you're interested in this stuff, check out Amy Clark's earlier research for some very enlightening exploration of the emotional and cultural resonances of color-words being used in non-literal contexts in Old English. (But when I say "enlightening," I don't mean a literal light will shine on you when you read it! That would be silly!)
On preview: Others have articulated my point more eloquently in this thread, but not as angrily. I'll post.
posted by Krawczak at 12:06 PM on May 2, 2023 [13 favorites]
My partner and I were meeting at a college campus near where we lived for a picnic.
I told her she'd know I had arrived because I’d lock my blue Bridgestone touring bike to the rack directly in front of the building where she’d had her office when she was a grad student. She looked a bit nonplussed but said OK.
After we connected that afternoon, she said 'what do you think you’re talking about calling that bike 'blue'? It's gray!' I insisted that it was a metallic blue and not even close to gray, and we just could not find common ground.
So we did a small survey, and she, being far more personable, asked the next three people who passed, all student age women as it happened, what color the bike was.
They all said it was gray, and when she asked whether it might be a little bluish, they all shook their heads and said "No!"
We all know that Viagra causes increased perception of blue, so much so that pilots are not allowed to fly within an interval after they’ve taken it because it might cause them to mistake green for blue.
I don’t think iron age Greeks were all suffering from ED, but I don’t think they were as well-nourished as we are, either.
So I don’t think we can entirely rule out the possibility that the perception of blue was significantly muted among the Ancient Greeks.
posted by jamjam at 12:19 PM on May 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
I told her she'd know I had arrived because I’d lock my blue Bridgestone touring bike to the rack directly in front of the building where she’d had her office when she was a grad student. She looked a bit nonplussed but said OK.
After we connected that afternoon, she said 'what do you think you’re talking about calling that bike 'blue'? It's gray!' I insisted that it was a metallic blue and not even close to gray, and we just could not find common ground.
So we did a small survey, and she, being far more personable, asked the next three people who passed, all student age women as it happened, what color the bike was.
They all said it was gray, and when she asked whether it might be a little bluish, they all shook their heads and said "No!"
We all know that Viagra causes increased perception of blue, so much so that pilots are not allowed to fly within an interval after they’ve taken it because it might cause them to mistake green for blue.
I don’t think iron age Greeks were all suffering from ED, but I don’t think they were as well-nourished as we are, either.
So I don’t think we can entirely rule out the possibility that the perception of blue was significantly muted among the Ancient Greeks.
posted by jamjam at 12:19 PM on May 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
Close your eyes and imagine a dark, stormy seascape. Imagine the sea looks like wine. Is that cRaAaZy?
Honestly...it's not coming in. Unless you say "alien planet," but then there we are.
or literally perceived color differently
Color isn't an objective quality. It feels like one, but it isn't. (Dress, anyone?) A difference in perception is not a hypothesis to be dismissed out of hand, though of course it has the problem of being very difficult to falsify.
Anyway, the only reason this is a notorious "problem" is alluded to in the article, but maybe not explained sufficiently for laypeople: it scans usefully according to the fairly constrained quantitative scanning schema of the Homeric poems (which only allows for two kinds of feet, long-long and long-short-short) so it ossified into a stock phrase of the type which is useful for oral performers/semi-improvisers of lengthy works. If it weren't for the conjunction of these two considerations, the phrase might've turned up twice and not attracted its centuries of debate.
posted by praemunire at 12:42 PM on May 2, 2023 [1 favorite]
Honestly...it's not coming in. Unless you say "alien planet," but then there we are.
or literally perceived color differently
Color isn't an objective quality. It feels like one, but it isn't. (Dress, anyone?) A difference in perception is not a hypothesis to be dismissed out of hand, though of course it has the problem of being very difficult to falsify.
Anyway, the only reason this is a notorious "problem" is alluded to in the article, but maybe not explained sufficiently for laypeople: it scans usefully according to the fairly constrained quantitative scanning schema of the Homeric poems (which only allows for two kinds of feet, long-long and long-short-short) so it ossified into a stock phrase of the type which is useful for oral performers/semi-improvisers of lengthy works. If it weren't for the conjunction of these two considerations, the phrase might've turned up twice and not attracted its centuries of debate.
posted by praemunire at 12:42 PM on May 2, 2023 [1 favorite]
(Or, to put it another way, we don't really think it's a problem that in the Odyssey the swineherd gets called "divine" or one of Penelope's suitors "blameless" (spoiler: neither is)...we get that the poet said "Eh, good enough." This one just happens to have been needed more.)
posted by praemunire at 12:47 PM on May 2, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by praemunire at 12:47 PM on May 2, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think people are getting a bit lost in the particular. "Wine-like" isn't the only color-descriptor in Homeric poetry which seems odd to us today. As mentioned in Harris' essay I quote above, blood and rainbows are purple. Honey is green. So is hair. There are lots of these examples, which is remarkable considering just how rarely color is used as a descriptor in the Iliad and Odyssey. And this seems broadly to hold across the oldest Greek texts we have. Whatever is going on, it's a genuinely difficult problem.
posted by Kattullus at 1:20 PM on May 2, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Kattullus at 1:20 PM on May 2, 2023 [3 favorites]
Honestly...it's not coming in. Unless you say "alien planet," but then there we are.
Perhaps years of digital color grading in film have affected my subjective color sense to the point that putting a reddish cast over my stormy mindscape doesn't seem unreasonable. Differences in perception, indeed.
I suppose it illustrates the very gaps in readers' interpretation that are under discussion here that I read your comment as striking a "well actually" tone implying I'm a "layperson" who doesn't grasp the point of the article, while restating the very points I was making: proper scansion vs "pretty and works well"; "got re-used" vs "ossified into a stock phrase."
I guess I'm just saying that it seems obvious to me that hue (or any other single characteristic) of a figurative description isn't a deal breaker, especially given the flexibility of language around, and perceptions of, color throughout languages and history. But clearly that isn't obvious to many people with skin in the game. Shrug.
On preview: Kattulus, Clark discusses the Old English tendency to describe gold as "red" as well. But even that goes further than wine-faced. Wine isn't, strictly speaking, a color, right?
posted by Krawczak at 1:33 PM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
Perhaps years of digital color grading in film have affected my subjective color sense to the point that putting a reddish cast over my stormy mindscape doesn't seem unreasonable. Differences in perception, indeed.
I suppose it illustrates the very gaps in readers' interpretation that are under discussion here that I read your comment as striking a "well actually" tone implying I'm a "layperson" who doesn't grasp the point of the article, while restating the very points I was making: proper scansion vs "pretty and works well"; "got re-used" vs "ossified into a stock phrase."
I guess I'm just saying that it seems obvious to me that hue (or any other single characteristic) of a figurative description isn't a deal breaker, especially given the flexibility of language around, and perceptions of, color throughout languages and history. But clearly that isn't obvious to many people with skin in the game. Shrug.
On preview: Kattulus, Clark discusses the Old English tendency to describe gold as "red" as well. But even that goes further than wine-faced. Wine isn't, strictly speaking, a color, right?
posted by Krawczak at 1:33 PM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
As mentioned in Harris' essay I quote above, blood and rainbows are purple. Honey is green. So is hair. There are lots of these examples, which is remarkable considering just how rarely color is used as a descriptor in the Iliad and Odyssey. And this seems broadly to hold across the oldest Greek texts we have.
But that all does make sense if there were literary conventions in the Bronze Age where these "color" descriptors had other well-known meanings, as they may well have had.
I couldn't exactly figure out how to phrase it earlier, but now I'll try: "blue" is a color in English, but it is also a mood. So you can theoretically call something that is objectively yellow, like a room, "blue", if it has a blue mood.
I think wine-blue made sense in Denmark from the mid-1800s and up to the mid 1900s because of the different uses of "wine" and "blue" during that time. Some of which might have been inspired by the Iliad translation. It still wouldn't be completely off today, but more unusual.
To me, as a teenager, wine-blue associated to the deep dark color of the sea on a depressing dark day. Like a day when you feel abandoned by your parents and your mates, a day where I like a Greek hero would be more often than not on the sea shore.
Purple blood and green honey don't confuse me either, though rainbows and hair do. But the bottom line is understanding that there are cultural differences. Today, I suppose a Dane could talk about feeling blue, because of all the global communication, but it would still be a bit odd. Whereas it is totally normal in the US.
BTW, we literally do see color very differently. As a professional, I can see many, many more colors than my sister who has excellent style and taste. Because I train every day. But I don't think this is really relevant in this context.
posted by mumimor at 1:44 PM on May 2, 2023 [7 favorites]
But that all does make sense if there were literary conventions in the Bronze Age where these "color" descriptors had other well-known meanings, as they may well have had.
I couldn't exactly figure out how to phrase it earlier, but now I'll try: "blue" is a color in English, but it is also a mood. So you can theoretically call something that is objectively yellow, like a room, "blue", if it has a blue mood.
I think wine-blue made sense in Denmark from the mid-1800s and up to the mid 1900s because of the different uses of "wine" and "blue" during that time. Some of which might have been inspired by the Iliad translation. It still wouldn't be completely off today, but more unusual.
To me, as a teenager, wine-blue associated to the deep dark color of the sea on a depressing dark day. Like a day when you feel abandoned by your parents and your mates, a day where I like a Greek hero would be more often than not on the sea shore.
Purple blood and green honey don't confuse me either, though rainbows and hair do. But the bottom line is understanding that there are cultural differences. Today, I suppose a Dane could talk about feeling blue, because of all the global communication, but it would still be a bit odd. Whereas it is totally normal in the US.
BTW, we literally do see color very differently. As a professional, I can see many, many more colors than my sister who has excellent style and taste. Because I train every day. But I don't think this is really relevant in this context.
posted by mumimor at 1:44 PM on May 2, 2023 [7 favorites]
In Ilium did Homer Khan
A baffling metaphor decree;
Linguistical debate soon ran
Through papers measureless by man
About the wine-dark sea.
Beware! Beware!
His violet blood! His chartreuse hair!
Was their language imprecise,
Or were they colorblind instead
If they called honey blue or red
In illustrational device?
posted by kyrademon at 1:54 PM on May 2, 2023 [16 favorites]
A baffling metaphor decree;
Linguistical debate soon ran
Through papers measureless by man
About the wine-dark sea.
Beware! Beware!
His violet blood! His chartreuse hair!
Was their language imprecise,
Or were they colorblind instead
If they called honey blue or red
In illustrational device?
posted by kyrademon at 1:54 PM on May 2, 2023 [16 favorites]
GenjiandProust, the book you read may have been Berlin and Kay’s Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. There are good reasons to critique it! Keeping those in mind, I found it a fascinating read, not least for questioning the naturalness/essentialness of the color terms I grew up with.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:25 PM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:25 PM on May 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
while restating the very points I was making: proper scansion vs "pretty and works well"; "got re-used" vs "ossified into a stock phrase."
These are actually not just re-stating the points you made, though. They are technical, not merely aesthetic, issues. In this theory, the recurrence of oínopa pónton is for reasons more analogous to the rhyming of "me" and "see" in modern pop songs or the recurrence of certain figures in modern improvisatory music than for prettiness reasons (*). And while you may feel criticized by my pointing them out...there is no reason to expect that anyone who hasn't read of any relevant texts in the original would know them. Frankly, I'm not even sure they're of all that much use to the casual reader who isn't into the technical structure, except that they help explain the occasional godlike swineherd. Which would be why the article literally makes exactly one reference that collapses both points, and I thought it might be helpful to the general discussion to amplify the reasons that, as it says without explaining further, "many contend that the phrase is meaningless."
(*) For anyone who cares, and to simplify a lot, mostly because my own understanding isn't that advanced, the scansion issue is that, in analyzing the meter of ancient Greek poetry, unlike English poetry, the quality of a syllable is distinguished (roughly) by the length of the vowel, not the stress, and so feet are defined by how the syllables in them are long or short instead of stressed or unstressed. So in English the foot called a dactyl is a stressed-unstressed-unstressed sequence, but in Greek it's long-short-short (in Homer, the short-short can also be replaced by a long). E.g., when we say "Benedict Cumberbatch" is a double-dactyl, it's because we say BEN-e-dict CUM-ber-batch (i.e., stressed-unstressed-unstressed, twice in a row), but in Greek you would look at whether the vowels are long or short and how they stand in relation to nearby consonants, which can sometimes modify that value.
In Homer's dactylic hexameter, you only have two options, two long syllables or a long-short-short sequence, to make up a foot, and you also have exactly six feet to a line. As you can imagine, this restricts the word choice in any given line considerably; it all has to fit together. As an extreme case, a four-syllable word that has three short syllables followed by one long syllable is nearly unusable, because it doesn't fit the pattern in itself and no matter what words precede or follow it, it can't break apart into that pattern (e.g., if the last syllable before it is long, you could get long-short-short, but then you have short-long left over, and that's not allowed to start a dactyl; if the last two syllables before it are long-short, you could get long-short-short again, but then you'd have short-short-long left over, which is not a dactyl). So phrases that slot easily into dactyls are valuable and can often be reused.
This interacts with the second point, oral semi-improvisation. If you look at a line of Homer, it will usually have one or two natural breaks, called caesuras, where the speaker can pause slightly for breath and/or emphasis. So epic poets would know stock phrases that, once they'd reached the caesura, could get them safely to the end of the line within the metrical restrictions. In English, the effect comes out something like:
"I am telling you important new material," Bob declared.
"I am relating my huge emotional reaction to this material," Sue declared.
"I am contradicting Bob's claim with my own facts," Jim declared.
Where "[x] declared" is a recurring phrase that happens to take you perfectly in conjunction with a one-syllable name to the end of the line. It's not that the writer is trying to make a huge point with using "declared" three times instead of varying it with "said" or "disagreed" or "claimed"--the important stuff is in quotes--it's that it fits mechanically.
These two influences together (along with many other things) help explain why there are so many recurring phrases in Homer (like the famous Homeric epithets) and why so many of them were archaisms even to Homer or might even be mostly meaningless. They helped the oral poet who was declaiming on his feet in real time, using blocks of material that he had substantially memorized but could hardly perform for an hour on end strictly from memory. The recurring phrases were easier to remember in the first place and if he was doing his own little flourish, it could rescue him mid-line and get him in correct meter safely home. I think the argument that oínopa pónton is like "declared" in my example, and because so much of the action is set or near the sea it gets used a ton and seems more significant than it is, is a good one. Though hardly the only respectable one.
posted by praemunire at 6:21 PM on May 2, 2023 [5 favorites]
These are actually not just re-stating the points you made, though. They are technical, not merely aesthetic, issues. In this theory, the recurrence of oínopa pónton is for reasons more analogous to the rhyming of "me" and "see" in modern pop songs or the recurrence of certain figures in modern improvisatory music than for prettiness reasons (*). And while you may feel criticized by my pointing them out...there is no reason to expect that anyone who hasn't read of any relevant texts in the original would know them. Frankly, I'm not even sure they're of all that much use to the casual reader who isn't into the technical structure, except that they help explain the occasional godlike swineherd. Which would be why the article literally makes exactly one reference that collapses both points, and I thought it might be helpful to the general discussion to amplify the reasons that, as it says without explaining further, "many contend that the phrase is meaningless."
(*) For anyone who cares, and to simplify a lot, mostly because my own understanding isn't that advanced, the scansion issue is that, in analyzing the meter of ancient Greek poetry, unlike English poetry, the quality of a syllable is distinguished (roughly) by the length of the vowel, not the stress, and so feet are defined by how the syllables in them are long or short instead of stressed or unstressed. So in English the foot called a dactyl is a stressed-unstressed-unstressed sequence, but in Greek it's long-short-short (in Homer, the short-short can also be replaced by a long). E.g., when we say "Benedict Cumberbatch" is a double-dactyl, it's because we say BEN-e-dict CUM-ber-batch (i.e., stressed-unstressed-unstressed, twice in a row), but in Greek you would look at whether the vowels are long or short and how they stand in relation to nearby consonants, which can sometimes modify that value.
In Homer's dactylic hexameter, you only have two options, two long syllables or a long-short-short sequence, to make up a foot, and you also have exactly six feet to a line. As you can imagine, this restricts the word choice in any given line considerably; it all has to fit together. As an extreme case, a four-syllable word that has three short syllables followed by one long syllable is nearly unusable, because it doesn't fit the pattern in itself and no matter what words precede or follow it, it can't break apart into that pattern (e.g., if the last syllable before it is long, you could get long-short-short, but then you have short-long left over, and that's not allowed to start a dactyl; if the last two syllables before it are long-short, you could get long-short-short again, but then you'd have short-short-long left over, which is not a dactyl). So phrases that slot easily into dactyls are valuable and can often be reused.
This interacts with the second point, oral semi-improvisation. If you look at a line of Homer, it will usually have one or two natural breaks, called caesuras, where the speaker can pause slightly for breath and/or emphasis. So epic poets would know stock phrases that, once they'd reached the caesura, could get them safely to the end of the line within the metrical restrictions. In English, the effect comes out something like:
"I am telling you important new material," Bob declared.
"I am relating my huge emotional reaction to this material," Sue declared.
"I am contradicting Bob's claim with my own facts," Jim declared.
Where "[x] declared" is a recurring phrase that happens to take you perfectly in conjunction with a one-syllable name to the end of the line. It's not that the writer is trying to make a huge point with using "declared" three times instead of varying it with "said" or "disagreed" or "claimed"--the important stuff is in quotes--it's that it fits mechanically.
These two influences together (along with many other things) help explain why there are so many recurring phrases in Homer (like the famous Homeric epithets) and why so many of them were archaisms even to Homer or might even be mostly meaningless. They helped the oral poet who was declaiming on his feet in real time, using blocks of material that he had substantially memorized but could hardly perform for an hour on end strictly from memory. The recurring phrases were easier to remember in the first place and if he was doing his own little flourish, it could rescue him mid-line and get him in correct meter safely home. I think the argument that oínopa pónton is like "declared" in my example, and because so much of the action is set or near the sea it gets used a ton and seems more significant than it is, is a good one. Though hardly the only respectable one.
posted by praemunire at 6:21 PM on May 2, 2023 [5 favorites]
From the classicist Peter Gainsford:
How to make sense of ancient Greek colours
Colours in Homer #1: the bronze sky
Colours in Homer #2: the wine-dark sea
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:41 PM on May 2, 2023 [6 favorites]
How to make sense of ancient Greek colours
Colours in Homer #1: the bronze sky
Colours in Homer #2: the wine-dark sea
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:41 PM on May 2, 2023 [6 favorites]
Thank you for further explaining, in greater detail and in an even more elevated academic register than before, the hows and whys of my point that effective figurative language can get preserved within a specific literary tradition. It frees my time up for other things.
One note, I'm not sure why you again felt it necessary to imply that someone with strong feelings about classical Greek poetry, actively participating in a thread about a specific detail of classical Greek poetry, wouldn't understand the basics of the structure of classical Greek poetry? I think your explication of the matter wouldn't have suffered from omitting that part.
But otherwise definitely a great contribution to the discussion for lurkers who may never get more exposure to the topic than reading this thread, good job!
posted by Krawczak at 8:46 AM on May 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
One note, I'm not sure why you again felt it necessary to imply that someone with strong feelings about classical Greek poetry, actively participating in a thread about a specific detail of classical Greek poetry, wouldn't understand the basics of the structure of classical Greek poetry? I think your explication of the matter wouldn't have suffered from omitting that part.
But otherwise definitely a great contribution to the discussion for lurkers who may never get more exposure to the topic than reading this thread, good job!
posted by Krawczak at 8:46 AM on May 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
Today after work, I looked up two of my favorite 20th poems that both have classical references and where I felt there might be some use of color-terms. One is Cavafy's Ithaca, which directly refers to Homer, and another Christensens Butterfly Valley: A Requiem.
There is no color in Ithaca, but it is a relatively short poem.
Butterfly Valley is a crown of sonnets, so much longer, albeit not on the scale of the Homeric works. It has colors in the third verse, but the very point of these particular colors is that they are basic elements, as well as colors, many other colors of butterflies aren't mentioned at all though the names of these species are.
I cannot read Greek, so I only know Ithaca in English, but I once heard it read in Greek and can attest that it is made for hearing, as is Butterfly Valley, which loses some of that musicality in English. It must be very hard to translate poetry.
Anyhow, I wouldn't look to poetry for a description of the physical world or a complete understanding of a language. Not today and not in antiquity. It makes me feel as if some scholars are looking at Picasso's Guernica for an accurate pictorial representation of the atrocities in that place.
posted by mumimor at 9:26 AM on May 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
There is no color in Ithaca, but it is a relatively short poem.
Butterfly Valley is a crown of sonnets, so much longer, albeit not on the scale of the Homeric works. It has colors in the third verse, but the very point of these particular colors is that they are basic elements, as well as colors, many other colors of butterflies aren't mentioned at all though the names of these species are.
I cannot read Greek, so I only know Ithaca in English, but I once heard it read in Greek and can attest that it is made for hearing, as is Butterfly Valley, which loses some of that musicality in English. It must be very hard to translate poetry.
Anyhow, I wouldn't look to poetry for a description of the physical world or a complete understanding of a language. Not today and not in antiquity. It makes me feel as if some scholars are looking at Picasso's Guernica for an accurate pictorial representation of the atrocities in that place.
posted by mumimor at 9:26 AM on May 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
praemunire: I appreciated the discussion of Greek poetic forms, as I've studied a bit of Ancient Greek, but didn't stick with it long enough to get to Homer or ancient poetry in general.
mumimor: It must be very hard to translate poetry.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a fantastic book exploring the nature of poetic translation, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. Each chapter starts with a different translation of a French poem that illustrates one of the points he explores in that chapter.
posted by indexy at 9:43 AM on May 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
mumimor: It must be very hard to translate poetry.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a fantastic book exploring the nature of poetic translation, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. Each chapter starts with a different translation of a French poem that illustrates one of the points he explores in that chapter.
posted by indexy at 9:43 AM on May 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
Just imagining the confusion when an ancient Greek MeFite accidentally posts something to the Green that was meant for the Winedark.
posted by eponym at 9:56 AM on May 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by eponym at 9:56 AM on May 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
I'm expanding on possible technical support for the "semi-nonsensical" characterization that, understandably, Alexander alludes to briefly but does not put forth in much detail in an article pitched at non-former-classics-majors, for the potential interest of other readers of this post, who, as probably 98% also non-former-classics-majors, might not be aware of and potentially could find interesting. In the United States, if you read Homer in translation in college, you learn that it's in dactylic hexameter and that's more or less it for the technicalities (it certainly was for me), so I don't think I'm insulting my audience with the implication that they might not know about it. If it makes you feel better, you can comfortably believe that my comments weren't intended for or as a reflection on you, personally, at all, because I promise you you, personally, weren't on my mind.
posted by praemunire at 12:01 PM on May 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 12:01 PM on May 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
Anyhow, I wouldn't look to poetry for a description of the physical world or a complete understanding of a language. Not today and not in antiquity. It makes me feel as if some scholars are looking at Picasso's Guernica for an accurate pictorial representation of the atrocities in that place.
And of course pre-WWII scholarship tended to treat the Greeks, especially the archaic Greeks, as more primitive than we ultra-moderns and thus just way more literal-minded, even in poetry. There's a hangover of that attitude still, especially for those of us who aren't scholars and have to rely more or less heavily on popular accounts. But it's not like we have an objective means of determining how literal any poet is being at any particular time, so it remains a thorny problem.
posted by praemunire at 12:11 PM on May 3, 2023 [3 favorites]
And of course pre-WWII scholarship tended to treat the Greeks, especially the archaic Greeks, as more primitive than we ultra-moderns and thus just way more literal-minded, even in poetry. There's a hangover of that attitude still, especially for those of us who aren't scholars and have to rely more or less heavily on popular accounts. But it's not like we have an objective means of determining how literal any poet is being at any particular time, so it remains a thorny problem.
posted by praemunire at 12:11 PM on May 3, 2023 [3 favorites]
BTW this is actually also personal to me. I have a cousin who is a famous poet, who wrote a poem about one of our common ancestors. And the most hilarious thing happened: a writer, who is actually supposed to be knowledgeable about literature, criticized my cousin's work for not being accurate about historical details. I get tears in my eyes from LOL'ing even today. It's a poem goddammit.
Anyway, one of the details the critic didn't like was about color: part of the poem is about the color of a particular flower which does not bloom at the time when the event in the poem factually happened, and at the time of the event, that flower did not even exist. It was created later by clever breeding. But my cousin needed that flower and that color for the poem, for formal reasons. They served a purpose, a formal purpose in the poem.
The whole thing reminded me that even people who study the liberal arts are not really educated in how fine arts work in practice. So an archeologist might not have the slightest idea about how a painter or a poet works with their stuff.
posted by mumimor at 12:22 PM on May 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
Anyway, one of the details the critic didn't like was about color: part of the poem is about the color of a particular flower which does not bloom at the time when the event in the poem factually happened, and at the time of the event, that flower did not even exist. It was created later by clever breeding. But my cousin needed that flower and that color for the poem, for formal reasons. They served a purpose, a formal purpose in the poem.
The whole thing reminded me that even people who study the liberal arts are not really educated in how fine arts work in practice. So an archeologist might not have the slightest idea about how a painter or a poet works with their stuff.
posted by mumimor at 12:22 PM on May 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
I keep reading this thread and thinking of Virginia Woolf's On Not Knowing Greek:
For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?
I've read the Iliad and the Odyssey over several times, in Greek, and I'm still in the dark about the level of intentionality you can really ascribe to some of the formulaic language in an oral tradition. I remember Greek and Latin professors arguing about this and throwing back and forth Homeric sayings with some sort of tension between an epithet and the noun's placement in a sentence. "My shining clothes are dirty." Some would say this was contradictory and some would say it was not. Some would say that many formulas are nonsense and some would not. My own feeling is that if the meaning of an adjective in Homeric Greek is not transparent to me, it may or may not have been transparent to someone closer to the language. I'm with Woolf on this; in many cases we just can't know. At the same time, like Woolf, I feel "forever drawn back," and some if that is precisely the uncertainty.
posted by BibiRose at 1:19 PM on May 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?
I've read the Iliad and the Odyssey over several times, in Greek, and I'm still in the dark about the level of intentionality you can really ascribe to some of the formulaic language in an oral tradition. I remember Greek and Latin professors arguing about this and throwing back and forth Homeric sayings with some sort of tension between an epithet and the noun's placement in a sentence. "My shining clothes are dirty." Some would say this was contradictory and some would say it was not. Some would say that many formulas are nonsense and some would not. My own feeling is that if the meaning of an adjective in Homeric Greek is not transparent to me, it may or may not have been transparent to someone closer to the language. I'm with Woolf on this; in many cases we just can't know. At the same time, like Woolf, I feel "forever drawn back," and some if that is precisely the uncertainty.
posted by BibiRose at 1:19 PM on May 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
Yea, a vivid metaphor that people still talk about after all these years.
It seems obvious to me that the Aegean Sea at twilight on a calm evening would remind a blind sage of a kylix of wine.
posted by ovvl at 3:27 PM on May 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
It seems obvious to me that the Aegean Sea at twilight on a calm evening would remind a blind sage of a kylix of wine.
posted by ovvl at 3:27 PM on May 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
go home sea you're wine-faced
posted by kyrademon at 5:43 PM on May 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by kyrademon at 5:43 PM on May 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
A few thoughts from Pliny the Elder on Rome and wine.
I thought he was more of a beer man.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:22 PM on May 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
I thought he was more of a beer man.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:22 PM on May 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
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I've seen this one before and I love it every time. It's the same kind of indulgent perversity which ponders the ability of ancient Egyptians to build piles of rocks without alien assistance. Of course they knew the sky was blue! And you can move rocks wherever you want with whip technology!
During the lockdowns I listened to this 24 lecture series on ancient Greek history from Yale. I would fail the exam - this is the kind of background noise I use to obscure my tinnitus. One thing I did learn is that they're just like us. Especially their politics. They had a guy who was just like Trump. They had a Manchin, an MTG, a Colin Powell - they had the whole zoo. You could take political quarrels from ancient Athens, replace the names for their modern counterparts, and post it in the NYT.
This article isn't silly enough to claim they didn't experience Blue, but I have seen it expressed that way. They weren't a different species guys, they had eyes like ours.
For the record, the colour of the sky is black in my timezone.
posted by adept256 at 3:04 AM on May 2, 2023 [11 favorites]