Homer
Homer's sea is 'wine-dark' and his sky is never blue. That started a 150-year argument about color words.
- Lived
- Traditionally c. 8th century BCE (uncertain)
- 'Wine-dark sea'
- 5 times in the Iliad, 12 in the Odyssey
- Noticed the missing blue
- William Gladstone, 1858
Homer, the poet (or poets) of the Iliad and the Odyssey, traditionally dated to around the 8th century BCE, calls the sea oinops pontos: literally the 'wine-faced sea', usually translated 'wine-dark sea'. The phrase appears 17 times across the two epics, often for rough, stormy water. Dawn is 'rosy-fingered'. But nowhere does Homer call the sea or the sky blue.
In 1858 the British statesman William Gladstone, in a three-volume study of Homer, noticed the missing blue and argued that Homer's color words tracked light and dark more than hue. Some readers took him to mean the Greeks were color-blind, which he later denied. In the 1860s the philologist Lazarus Geiger found blue missing from other ancient texts too, including the Vedas and the Hebrew Bible, and proposed that color words appear in a fixed order, with blue last.
Geiger's order anticipated Berlin and Kay's basic color terms a century later. The modern verdict: Homer's Greeks saw blue as well as we do; they lacked an everyday word for it. The word kyanos, later 'blue', means 'dark' in Homer, who uses it for Zeus's eyebrows. Greeks used a manufactured blue, Egyptian blue, so the gap is in the words, not the eyes (see do words change what we see?).
Why 'wine-dark'? Nobody knows for sure. Greek wine may have looked different from ours, or the phrase may carry the sea's mood, heady, dark and dangerous, more than its hue; Homer also uses oinops for reddish oxen. Old color words often measure darkness, shine or feeling as much as hue, which is exactly how Aristotle later built colors out of light and dark.
Swatches
- Oinops · 'wine-faced' sea (approx.)
- Rhododaktylos · rosy-fingered dawn
- Kyaneos · 'dark' (later 'blue')
Colors
Sources
- Gladstone, W. E. (1858). Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. Oxford University Press.
- Gladstone, W. E. (1877). The Colour-Sense. The Nineteenth Century 2 (October 1877).
- Deutscher, G. (2010). Through the Language Glass. Metropolitan Books.
- Alexander, C. (2013). A winelike sea. Lapham's Quarterly 6(3).
- Wikipedia, 'Wine-dark sea'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.