Homer and the Wine Dark Sea

One frequently hears this Homeric tag, 'the wine dark sea.' No, not the donut-eating Homer, the founder of western literature Homer.

There has been some controversy on the subject. After all, the sea looks blue-green, not purple (or whatever color was the wine Homer might have been drinking when he came up with the tag.)

There are lots of explanations. Julian Jaynes, the author of the controversial thesis about the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," used it as support for the proposition that human neurology has changed over time, even within historic time. That proposition is of course critical to his broader theory about consciousness as arising from the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

But there is a simpler explanation, offered to me years ago, but one I've never seen in print. In Homer's day, people didn't drink wine from glasses. They didn't have glasses. They had opaque ceramic containers. So they didn't know what wine looked like through glass. They knew what it looked like AFTER it had been spilled into the linen of the table, though.

And if you try the experiment of spilling wine onto linen (I've tried the experiment), you may see that the stain does NOT look "wine colored." It looks more oceanic.

Sorry Jaynes, but no neurological change is required here.

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