Some months ago, I recorded a vivid fantasy in which I saw the Homeric heroes Ajax and Epicles fighting under a blue sun and noted that this would explain Homer's famous "wine-dark sea."
Homer's "wine-dark sea" seems bizarre to us moderns, for whom wine is red and the sea is blue. Under a blue sun, though, the sea would not look any bluer than anything else, and "red" -- reflecting less blue light than any other visible color -- would be a close cousin to "dark."
Obviously, I don't really believe the Sun was ever blue, though, so Homer's sea remains a mystery.
Homeric Greek (like several other languages) apparently only had four basic color words -- black, white, red, and yellow. Of the four, black is obviously the best fit for the color of the sea, and arguably for "red" wine as well. (The color of tea is similarly ambiguous. The sort of tea that is called "black" in English is called "red" in Chinese.)
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| Basically red, or basically black? |
So it's not surprising at all that Homer would use the same color word -- black -- to describe both wine and the sea. Still, "wine-dark" is surprising. Many languages consider pink a shade of red and would call a pink piglet "red" -- but would they ever call it blood-red? Even if piglets and blood are both "red" in some languages, a piglet obviously isn't the color of blood and would never be described that way. We can see something similar in English. In Old English, as in modern Russian, there was a basic distinction between light blue (Russian голубой) and dark blue (Russian синий), similar to the distinction between pink and red. Modern English uses blue (originally meaning "light blue") for both -- but sky-blue is still used exclusively for things that are light blue like the sky, not dark blue like the sea. Homer's calling the sea "wine-dark" is precisely as strange as a modern English speaker calling it "sky-blue."
On the other hand, there's my wife, who (like my father) is incapable of distinguishing certain shades of blue (that of my eyes, for instance) from gray. At first I thought this was purely a linguistic phenomenon -- that she applied the label blue to a somewhat different range of colors than I did. Once, though, we were arguing over whether a particular blanket was blue (as it very obviously was!) or gray, and I said, "When I say gray, I mean the color of a mouse. Look at that blanket. Could a mouse be that color?" And she insisted that, yes, a mouse could be that color!
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| Grey as a mouse? |
Run an image search for "cartoon mouse" or "cartoon elephant," and you'll find a surprising number of results that are blue -- so apparently my wife is not alone in this. So, who knows, perhaps Homer really did see the sea as being the same color as wine.
Recently, it occurred to me to wonder if Homer's wine-dark sea had anything to do with the mystery of violet. Technically, purple is a mixture of red and blue light, while violet is a spectral color lying between blue and ultraviolet on the spectrum, and is thus further from red than blue is. For most people, though, spectral violet looks exactly like purple. (The RGB color system used by the screen on which you are reading this is unable to display spectral violet at all, but no one notices the absence of this basic color.) For other people -- including me, I think, as well as whoever wrote "Roses are red, violets are blue" -- spectral violet does not appear at all red; instead, the visible spectrum ends with darker and darker blues finally giving way to black. The sea is dark blue, indistinguishable from spectral violet as I see it. For many other people, both red wine and spectral violet appear "purple." Is this fact -- that the last color of the rainbow looks purple (that is, dark magenta) to some and dark blue to others -- related to the mystery of the "wine-dark sea"? As far as I know, no one individual would ever perceive wine and the sea as being the same color, but perhaps a culture including both violets-are-blue people and violets-are-purple people could have developed a convention of calling both wine and the sea "violet." This doesn't explain Homer's "wine-dark oxen," though, since oxen are never either purple or blue, but it still seems a promising line of inquiry.
