Homer

Against the Wine-Dark Current

Understanding the spectrum of opacity in Ancient Greek.

Ezra Butler

19 Aug 2026 — 7 min read

A few weeks ago, as I was walking by a bookstore here in Cambridge, I was taunted by a new book in the window, Homeric translator Emily Wilson's Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. I say "taunted", because more than two years ago, I wrote about that verse in Homer and the incorrect conclusions people have arrived at regarding Ancient Greek color perception based on the common translation.

One thing I've discovered since starting my research into the history and language of color, is that everything is connected. And if I would only focus on a single time period or language, I would miss a larger trend.

In this newsletter, I'm going to briefly review some examples of what I call "Linguistic Syncretisms" which are words which seem to be comprised of combining words with slightly different meanings from two different languages. Then I am going to show how researching the etymology of "glucose" can help us better understand and appreciate Homer's poetry.

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Glaucus

The first topic I researched for this newsletter, 100 posts ago, was the color glaucus, the blue-green color of the ocean, or my eyes. It centered around one of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a fisherman who became an immortal sea-god by eating a magic herb named Glaucus.

The initial question I had which led me down that rabbit-hole was "how or why is youth connected to blue?" In both English and French, the word blue has always had a connotation of “novice, young”, and before learning about the word “glaucus”, I always assumed it was because some sort of army cadets wore blue. I was wrong.

Looking back, while I have many questions about that first post, it led to numerous other pieces. Because it was a beginning, not an end. The more I researched about different topics through history, the more commonalities I began to see, and wonder if I missed something.

Baby Blues

All this while I had missed the very basic simple reason why youth is connected to the color blue: Because most light-skinned newborn babies have blue eyes when they are born.

Linguistic Syncretisms

The best way which I can describe linguistic syncretisms are words that the argument could be made that they have origins in two different languages.

As I wrote in the first newsletter:

Gars (and later Garço) meant “blue, the color of water” in Spanish which was roughly the same thing glaucus meant in Latin, and a slew of related cognates and meanings that are connected to bawdy juvenile behavior and debauchery, or garçonia. Interestingly, the Spanish-French dictionary described garço de ojos as eyes which are green or blue.

Amarilla / yellow

I discovered that amarilla may have had both Latin and Arabic roots, and was a word which played with both cultures in al-Andalus. That made me think back to garço, and the Arabic word for blue أزرق (ʔazraq). The color appears to have a similar development as the word γλαυκός (glaukós). The idea that a word like garço could be an adaptive blend of the two words (glaucus and ʔazraq), and combine their respective meanings was something I would have never considered had I not researched amarilla first.

I'm currently writing a paper on the Judeo-Aramaic word used to describe the color of sunrise (z-h-r), which we know from the newsletter I wrote on the word "bizarre". The difference between the word root ز ر ق (z-r-q) (blue, glistening, bright) and ز ه ر (z-h-r) (orange-red, gleaming, sunrise) is very slight. In early Judeo-Aramaic translations, that same root is bizarrely used to translate the Biblical color of "scarlet".

The ludicrous West Flemish word for blue-green, Appelblauwzeegroen

As I discovered during my research, it is more a testament to the desire to create a word which nodded to both the French and Dutch languages, while maintaining a distinctive dialect.

"Orange"

It makes makes sense either as a pomme d'orange (golden fruit) or as naranja. The addition of the "n" may have been a nod by the French speakers to what they had assumed the original Greek word was, which they only knew through the Arabic translation.

Against the Current

A few years ago, I wrote about the color of wine in antiquity, opting to analyze Homer's famous phrase from the Odyssey (now a feature film), οἶνοψ πόντος (oînops póntos), (now the title of Homeric-translator Emily Wilson's new book Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea).

2:420
τοῖσιν δ᾽ ἴκμενον οὖρον ἵει γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη,
ἀκραῆ Ζέφυρον, κελάδοντ᾽ ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον.

And bright-eyed Athena sent them a favorable wind,
a strong-blowing West wind that sang over the wine-dark sea.
(Murray, Loeb, second edition)

Athena called a favorable wind,
pure Zephyr whistling on wine-dark sea.
(Wilson)

As I mentioned then:

The wine-eyed sea is used to contrast Athena's bright eyes.

I found there to be a beautiful symmetry in Homer's verse, contrasting the bright-eyed Athena (γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη) and the, literally, wine-eyed sea (οἴνοπα πόντον). At that time, after quoting sources from Genesis and Proverbs, I wrote:

It could literally simply mean "dulled", "hazy" and "disordered", not because of the color of wine, but due to the lack of visual clarity or mental acuity that most people have after drinking a few bottles of wine.

Glucose and Glaucus

Following a conversation with a friendly paleoethnobotanist a few months ago, I decided to return to the subject of the color of wine in late antiquity and during the 4^th-6^th centuries in Byzantium.

During the course of my research, I came across a published "transaction" from The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists by Philip Mayerson, comparing and contrasting the words γλεῦκος (glucose) and μοϋοτος (must) as words for young, unfermented, wine.

Consider the relationship between γλεῦκος (glucose) and γλαυκός (glaucus). The words are certainly etymologically linked, most likely with referring to the unfermented must as young and visually transparent, allowing light to gleam through (glaucus), which ultimately evolved into the word associated with the high sugar content of the grape juice (glucose). Similarly as wine ages, it can be described as becoming more opaque and complex. As I showed in the original newsletter, that description would be used to describe people aging and becoming wiser as well.

There is a spectrum of opacity which lay between glucose and wine, or γλαυκωπις and οἶνοψ. While "Wine-Dark" may be a decent translation, it misses the inherent linguistic wordplay and the parallel structure of the verse. Which is fine, if you simply want to enjoy the story.

Every translation is an interpretation, and we should restrain from jumping to conclusions about the Ancient Greek perception of color when we still don't fully appreciate the Ancient Greek use of poetic language.