A Winelike Sea
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
The author suggests it's something like the clarity that Homer was observing and that's been my assumption for a while. It's unsurprising that we're confused what the word might've meant, given how imprecise we are about similar topics.
The thing to understand here is that the ancient people who would have heard these words from a poet did not drink wine as we understand it.
Wine was a concentrated product added to water for consumption. This did a few things, but the important ones are condense calories, make the water safe to drink, and the concentrated wine product was easier to store and ship. Wine dark means this stuff.
We think of epic poetry as some kind of high literature. They were more like Marvel movies of the day. Wine dark is not a fanciful metaphor, but rather something the audience understood and fit into the meter.
Homeric verse had to fit into dactylic hexameter. Easy phrases are sprinkled throughout Epic poetry that make the scantion work out. Wine-dark sea is one of them. Swift-footed Achilles and Rosy-fingered dawn are some other notable examples.
These phrases are used when it makes no sense. The Iliad talks about Swift footed Achilles sitting down, so arguments that meter isn’t determining turns of phrase is simply wrong. It’s just an epithet that fit into the scantion.
These are really long poems that were recited, from memory to audiences. Memory was their primary storage. So there are a lot of “go-to” easy phrases that are really just vamping, but since it’s thousands of years old we want it to mean more.
There are other theories about Homeric verse. Scholars are pretty sure about formulaic composition explaining some features of Homer. It passes the sniff test and is a simple explanation to a lot of artifacts in the Homeric texts. Some analysis of Homer is misguided since it wasn’t made as a written work. This isn’t a universal belief among scholars today afaik, but it’s a defensible position.
Homer was considered the highest litterature at the time, so I’m not sure what this analogy means?
Marvel makes the best-made literature of our time, from a professional craftsmanship perspective.
Good for you if you appreciate Marvel-branded content, but it doesn’t make Marvel Homer.
The closest analogy to marvel movies would probably be satyr plays.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20638158
Myself I have never understood why the debate. Oceans can appear to be very dark on cloudy stormy days, and the sky can be red, giving an impression of a wine like colour, or at least wine in a container.
What is more interesting is that is was not until the 1850s people started to debate the description. So for nearly 2500 years nobody seems to have thought twice about it.
Could the mode of thought of the ancients have been so alien to us, that (at least some aspects of) their minds are no longer comprehensible?
This isn't, after all, the only example of it. Jayne himself posited that a few millennia ago, everyone was some sort of schizoid puppets, lacking the capacity to have a will of their own.
This might not even be the sum of it. If they could be so alien, and thought in ways now incomprehensible to us, why then might it not be so that we too suffer similarly irrational ideation? Are there things important to us beyond reason, that seem to make all the sense in the world now?
Crazy talk. Stupidity. Incoherent ramblings. But that's why everyone wonders such silently, hoping the other guy will take the bait and suggest it...
Understanding another person can be a range of things. Attributing coherent motives for observed action might be on the one end of the scale. Feeling exactly what they are feeling might be on the other.
Even for other people today it can be hard to bridge that gap. We can imagine ourselves in their positions, trying to feel what they are feeling. Some dimension of their inner life will doubtlessly escape us.
However even with the ancients, we can in most cases understand why they did what they did. People are puzzled by details like the "wine-dark sea" exactly because they understand many other parts of the Iliad and Odyssey quite well.
There are about 90 generations separating us from Homer. Quite a lot changed in that time, but these are mostly humans like ourselves and we can relate to them ok.
Also for Julian Jaynes, "schizoid puppet" is a bit over-dramatized for his (theorized) lack of self-awareness in Bronze Age or older people, for context, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
That when they did act, it was a big booming voice inside their head that they took to be the voices of various gods and deities, guiding them through life via micromanagement.
The wikipedia article does not really do it justice.
I wish I could dismiss it as woowoo nonsense. But far more recently, there are credible reports of circumstances where because a bunch of people were dancing, those who came near them and noticed started dancing uncontrollably themselves, for days on end. Some even dying of exhaustion.
The software that is the human mind is buggy as shit, easily put into bad states, and networked enough that glitches are apparently contagious.
But that just makes it weirder. If culture alone lets you see colors differently... then what other basic, fundamental experiences are subject to being so wildly different?
> Could the mode of thought of the ancients have been so alien to us, that (at least some aspects of) their minds are no longer comprehensible?
While it's an interesting question — I find myself musing on what it might mean for some thought to be literally un-thinkable for some specific human — I think most people have the opposite problem.
Then again, perhaps I'm projecting that assumption: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy
If you look at "natural wines" available now you'll see they are all kinds of colors. If you look at the sea in different circumstances it will be different colors.
I suspect the reason this becomes a problem for modern readers is that we became used to drinking unadulterated wines from crystal clear glasses. My guess is that to an ancient Greek, the color of wine was less a fixed point and more of a spectrum.
And as you point out they would have been looking at wine in a cup (without transparent sides) so it would have just looked dark most of the time rather than particularly red.
> Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969; ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms for black/dark and white/bright. If a culture has three color terms, the third is red. If a culture has four, it has either yellow or green.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
And:
> Berlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:
>
> All languages contain terms for black and white.
> If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
> If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
> If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
> If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
> If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
> If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.
According to this chart, does that mean that Japanese had five or less terms for different colors?
All languages used to only have on word for blue/green, until they got a second worth splitting the two. Perhaps see §Japanese at:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
Also:
I might have a video of me slowly moving my finger down, the eye absolutely could not tell when it would hit water and it looked like there was no water. I'll see if I did in fact make the video, I certainly wanted to.
> the goddess of the white arms, Hera, put this in his mind,
and shortly after:
> Son of Atreus, I now think that, staggering back, we shall go home again
which is at odds with the only thing I have ever learnt about Ancient Greek texts, which is that they had no concept of the mind or of thinking.
From this Scott Alexander book review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
> So for example, a typical translation might use a phrase like “Fear filled Agamemnon’s mind”. Wrong! There is no word for “mind” in the Iliad, except maybe in the very newest interpolations. The words are things like kardia, noos, phrenes, and thumos, which Jaynes translates as heart, vision/perception, belly, and sympathetic nervous system, respectively. He might translate the sentence about Agamemnon to say something like “Quivering rose in Agamemnon’s belly”. It still means the same thing – Agamemnon is afraid – but it’s how you would talk about it if you didn’t have an idea of “the mind” as the place where mental things happened – you would just notice your belly was quivering more. Later, when the Greeks got theory of mind, they repurposed all these terms. You can still find signs of this today, like how we say “I believe it in my heart”.
Of course it's possible that Jaynes is simply wrong, and the Greeks did have a concept of the mind, and a translation that talks about the mind is genuinely more faithful than one that does not.
They may not have had an explicit concept of a unified entity containing all of reason, imagination, sense perception, and morality, the way we think of the mind now. But they did have an understanding of these processes and an experience of them being interrelated.
And also remember that "ancient greece" was a period spanning like a thousand years with hugely varying degrees of cultural and linguistic homogeneity over that period. Scholars of antiquity are very careful about qualifying their claims as to who and when they apply. It's notable that Alexander doesn't take that care.
We have a ton of information about how certain philosophers thought at a certain time. But their focus is narrowly technical, they're as much defining their jargon than they are describing how words are used and understood broadly among greeks. We should be careful not to absorb their confidence into our understanding.
It's really weird to me how it's a debate.
Really dark purple wine can start to look bluish in the right environment, which could remind someone of a dark ocean on a cloudy day.
I’ve never lived near the Atlantic, only visited periodically, so probably unaware of the full spectrum of its appearance. I’ve had a lot of wine, though.
There, the deep, dark sea contrasts even more starkly with the bright, crystal-clear waters along the shore. I suspect this was the distinction Homer was after, rather than trying to describe the specific hue for an audience that was likely closely familiar with the appearance of the sea to begin with.
> "And now have I put in here, as thou seest, with ship and crew, while sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech, on my way to Temese for copper..."
> "Nay, if thou wilt, go and ask the old warrior Laertes, who, they say, comes no more to the city, but afar in the fields suffers woes attended by an aged woman as his handmaid, who sets before him food and drink, after weariness has laid hold of his limbs, as he creeps along the slope of his vineyard plot..."
> "What feast, what throng is this? What need hast thou of it? Is it a drinking bout, or a wedding feast?"
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
It could just be a literary device used to invoke the effects of alcohol in the context of setting sail on an ocean, on a dangerous journey from which the voyager may not return.
Colors were gendered; women could be white-armed, but never a man, who would be described as dark if he were masculine.
Couldn’t the same hold here? The sea is powerful so it is indeed dark like wine.
https://aeon.co/essays/when-homer-envisioned-achilles-did-he...
The sea is something completely different, and the darkness isn't a power reference anyway. Men are not called "dark" because they're stronger than women; they're called that because they're darker than women. And, as the article notes, the sea isn't called "dark" at all. "Dark" was a suggestion introduced in the 19th century by the standard classical Greek dictionary.
https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-hope-to-understand-how-the-gre...
See: https://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060302025443/finalfant...
I don't know or remember what is the context in the original, but for example, a sea that is so calm that it is inviting to travel, or deceptively calm, but if you travel long enough, maybe you will be lost, passing out, going mad or getting destroyed?
For example, we don't know how exactly the wide looked like in the 8th century B.C.E. as the wine making process has changed a lot since then. I am not talking about the color but also its hue.