CREATIVE PRACTICE PHD
LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY
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LJMU: Prof. Joasia Krysa
TT: Sarah Bennett
Expositionality in Action examples
In ancient Greek, the phrase is oínopa pónton—oínopa being a compound of oínos, meaning “wine,” and óps, meaning “eye” or “face”—literally, “wine-faced,” and thus “wine-ish,” or “winelike.” The enduring “wine-dark” was established in the Greek-English Lexicon famously compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott and first published in 1843. According to Liddell and Scott, oínopa means “wine-colored” and is used by Homer, in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, only of oxen and the sea.
When used of the sea, the authors suggest, it is best rendered “wine-dark,” meaning, within its broader context, “the color of dark wine.”
They do not hazard what Homer meant by this phrasing, and a survey of principal modern English translations provides neither consensus nor clarity. Richmond Lattimore, in his landmark version of 1951, used, inexplicably, “the wine-blue sea.” Robert Fitzgerald in his translation of 1974 tweaked the dictionary to the collapsed “winedark,” while Robert Fagles stayed true to Liddell and Scott. Other renderings are Stanley Lombardo’s “the sea’s gray wine,” and, most recently, Stephen Mitchell’s “the sea,” in a translation that ditches most epithets and even many simple adjectives.
Just as the English language marks distinct aspects of the sea with distinct terminology, such as sea, ocean, and the deep, so too does Homeric Greek. In the most basic sense, the sea is háls, the same word for “salt,” and is used, according to Liddell and Scott, “generally of shallow water near shore.” The sea as distinct from heaven and land and other water is thálassa, the elemental sea that Achilles evokes to signal the great distance between his home and the Trojans: “Since there are many things between us,/both shadowy mountains and clashing sea.”
But the “winelike” sea, the sea that is oínopa, is called pónton—“the open sea,” “deep sea,” “high sea,” the ocean, or what sailors call “blue water.” Indo-European cognates suggest the word’s origin lies in the notion of a “path” or “passage” across the water: “a road where there are obstacles, a crossing,” according to one grammarian. When weeping Achilles looks toward “the winelike sea…stretching forth his hands,” he is reaching for the oínopa pónton, the sea that despite its danger could still provide him passage to the place his thoughts always turn—home.
This wine-dark sea has haunted many imaginations. Nineteenth-century British prime minister William Gladstone posited in Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age that the Greeks had a form of color-blindness, their optical palette limited to black and white, and possibly red. Another theory was that a type of algal bloom, red tide, made the Homeric-era Aegean wine-red. In the 1980s, the view was advanced that since the ancient Greeks mixed their wine with water, the alkaline water common to the Peloponnesus would have turned red wine to blue. Another view came from a retired classicist who watched “an unusually vivid sunset” over the sea at the mouth of the Damariscotta River, in Maine, on an evening when the sky was filled with ash that had floated east from the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and was struck by the color of the sea “reflected in the outgoing tide of the dark estuary.” The sea, he said, was the color of Mavrodaphne, a wine of deep purple-brown hue, and the epithet for Homer’s wine-colored sea, he speculated, meant “sunset-red.” Finally, many contend that the phrase is meaningless, an empty expression with a poetic ring whose purpose is only to fill out the metrical requirements of a line of the verse.
The image Homer hoped to conjure with his winelike sea greatly depended upon what wine meant to his audience. While the Greeks likely knew of white wine, most ancient wine was red, and in the Homeric epics, red wine is the only wine specifically described. Drunk at feasts, poured onto the earth in sacred rituals, or onto the ashes around funeral pyres, Homeric wine is often mélas, “dark,” or even “black,” a term with broad application, used of a brooding spirit, anger, death, ships, blood, night, and the sea. It is also eruthrós, meaning “red” or the tawny-red hue of bronze; and aíthops, “bright,” “gleaming,” a term also used of bronze and of smoke in firelight. While these terms notably have more to do with light, and the play of light, than with color proper, Homeric wine was clearly dark and red and would have appeared especially so when seen in the terracotta containers in which it was transported. “Winelike sea” cannot mean clear seawater, nor the white splash of sea foam, nor the pale color of a clear sea lapping the shallows of a sandy shore.
Modern examination of the Greek sense of color began with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who concluded in his Theory of Colors, published in 1810, like Gladstone after him, that Greek color perception was simply defective. Others looking beyond the Greeks to the ancient world in general discovered astonishing lapses, including the total absence in any ancient text of reference to the sky as blue. Blue, it was theorized, is rare in nature—few people have blue eyes, blue plants are rare—and so this uncommon, difficult to replicate color went unrecognized. Yet the ancient world knew of, and coveted, lapis lazuli; and flowers, such as the cornflower and flax, are in fact blue.
Rather than being ignorant of color, it seems that the Greeks were less interested in and attentive to hue, or tint, than they were to light. As late as the fourth century bc, Plato named the four primary colors as white, black, red, and bright, and in those cases where a Greek writer lists colors “in order,” they are arranged not by the Newtonian colors of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—but from lightest to darkest. And the Iliad contains a broad, specialized vocabulary for describing the movement of light: argós meaning “flashing” or “glancing white”; aiólos, “glancing, gleaming, flashing,” or, according to Cunliffe’s Lexicon, “the notion of glancing light passing into that of rapid movement,” and the root of Hector’s most defining epithet, koruthaíolos—great Hector “of the shimmering helm.” Thus, for Homer, the sky is “brazen,” evoking the glare of the Aegean sun and more ambiguously “iron,” perhaps meaning “burnished,” but possibly our sense of a “leaden” sky. Significantly, two of the few unambiguous color terms in the Iliad, and which evoke the sky in accordance with modern sensibilities, are phenomena of light: “Dawn robed in saffron” and dawn shining forth in “rosy fingers of light.”
Excerpts from Caroline Alexander's excellent article,
"A Winelike Sea", in Lapham's Quarterly