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The Wine-Dark Sea:
Color and Perception in the Ancient World
“And jealous now of me, you gods, because I befriend a man, one I saved as he straddled the keel alone, when Zeus had blasted and shattered his swift ship with a bright lightning bolt, out on the wine-dark sea.”
—Homer, The Odyssey, Book V
Perception is a funny beast. Homer’s “wine-dark sea” has puzzled scholars for centuries, leading to such far-flung hypotheses as strange weather effects, air pollution, and mass Grecian color-blindness.
It’s a phrase repeated in the works of W. H. Auden, Patrick O’Brian, and Brian Jacques, among others. Reading it today, we naturally assume that it is intended as allegory, some evocative reference to the sea’s mystery, its intoxication.
We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an interesting light: there is no word for “blue” in ancient Greek.
Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also the color of wine; honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze.
It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five colors (metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent philosopher even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color was limited to four categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and yellow. Xenophanes, another philosopher, described the rainbow as having but three bands of color: porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).
The conspicuous absence of blue is not limited to the Greeks. The color “blue” appears not once in the New Testament, and its appearance in the Torah is questioned (there are two words argued to be types of blue, sappir and tekeleth, but the latter appears to be arguably purple, and neither color is used, for instance, to describe the sky). Ancient Japanese used the same word for blue and green (青 Ao), and even modern Japanese describes, for instance, thriving trees as being “very blue,” retaining this artifact (青々とした: meaning “lush” or “abundant”).
It turns out that the appearance of color in ancient texts, while also reasonably paralleling the frequency of colors that can be found in nature (blue and purple are very rare, red is quite frequent, and greens and browns are everywhere), tends to happen in the same sequence regardless of civilization: red : ochre : green : violet : yellow—and eventually, at least with the Egyptians and Byzantines, blue.
“Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
—Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2
Blue certainly existed in the world, even if it was rare, and the Greeks must have stumbled across it occasionally even if they didn’t name it. But the thing is, if we don’t have a word for something, it turns out that to our perception—which becomes our construction of the universe—it might as well not exist. Specifically, neuroscience suggests that it might not just be “good or bad” for which “thinking makes it so,” but quite a lot of what we perceive.
The malleability of our color perception can be demonstrated with a simple diagram, shown here as figure six, “Afterimages”. The more our photoreceptors are exposed to the same color, the more fatigued they become, eventually giving out entirely and creating a reversed “afterimage” (yellow becomes blue, red becomes green). This is really just a parlor trick of sorts, and more purely physical, but it shows how easily shifted our vision is; other famous demonstrations like this selective attention test (its name gives away the trick) emphasize the power our cognitive functions have to suppress what we see. Our brains are pattern-recognizing engines, built around identifying things that are useful to us and discarding the rest of what we perceive as meaningless noise. (And a good thing that they do; deficiencies in this filtering, called sensory gating, are some of what cause neurological dysfunctions such as schizophrenia and autism.)
This suggests the possibility that not only did Homer lack a word for what we know as “blue”—he might never have perceived the color itself. To him, the sky really was bronze, and the sea really was the same color as wine. And because he lacked the concept “blue”—therefore its perception—to him it was invisible, nonexistent. This notion of concepts and language limiting cognitive perception is called linguistic relativism, and is typically used to describe the ways in which various cultures can have difficulty recalling or retaining information about objects or concepts for which they lack identifying language. Very simply: if we don’t have a word for it, we tend to forget it, or sometimes not perceive it at all.
The famed neuroscientist Dr. Oliver Sacks (you might know him as Robin Williams’s character in Awakenings) described a poignant example of linguistic or conceptual relativism with regard to schizophrenia. Accounts of the disease prior to the 19th century are rare, and none at all exist in ancient literature (as opposed to “madness,” which was documented, but primarily concerned aimless wandering and spontaneous violence). The broad classification of “madness” persisted well through the 19th century, with schizophrenia identified in the early twentieth, and still considered rare through the middle of the century. When Sacks began practicing in 1965 in New York City, and in particular began studying disorders related to schizophrenia, he was shocked by a gradually increasing awareness that the disease was not nearly as rare as the science of the day claimed—especially among the homeless. Importantly, the clinical assumption that “schizophrenia is rare” was reinforcing the rarity of its diagnosis, to the point of blinding doctors to what was right in front of them. These blooms in diagnosis—we have been for the last ten years experiencing a bloom in autism recognition—have as much to do with clinical perception as they do with the actual physical incidence of the conditions.
On a lighter note, Sacks also recently recalled that the most magnificent thing he had ever seen in his life was a field of yellow, seen while he was—is it appropriate to say a famous neuroscientist was high? Say rather that he was conducting experiential research in a varied state of neurochemical condition! But however you slice it, he says it was the most yellow yellow he had ever seen or expects to see again, a yellow beyond description, a yellow of interstellar radiance and the breath of ancient gods.
It isn’t the first time that Dr. Sacks has discussed color and altered states: in “The Dog Beneath the Skin,” he tells the infamous story of the 22-year-old medical student who, under the influence of PCP and amphetamines, enters a week-long heightened state of awareness. Among other things, this student—decades later revealed to have been Sacks himself, of course—perceived “dozens of browns” where previously he had seen only one shade. (Dr. Sacks does not now recommend this type of student experimentation.)
This particular super-sensory color perception is, too, reminiscent of another physical condition related to color: tetrachromacy. Most humans are trichromatic, possessing three types of color-sensing cone cells—but an undetermined percentage of women, as well as almost all birds, are tetrachromatic, possessing four receptor types. Tetrachromats perceive a kind of fourth primary color, usually a blue-green, that gives them a heightened ability to distinguish between shades of color, often to the point of distinguishing separate shades where a trichromat will perceive identicality.
“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, novelist, synesthete
We need not travel far to determine whether these enhanced states of perception—which, given that we remain the same species as Homer, can be societal or psychological in their impetus—can impact our worldview, or our creative selves.
We know that people with synesthesia, a neurological anomaly in which one sensation “bleeds” into other sensations, are eight times more likely to pursue careers in the arts than non-synesthetes. Synesthesia comes in many varieties, but those with a visual variant (for instance perceiving numbers and letters in colors) are more likely to become visual artists—or novelists.
Vladimir Nabokov, novelist and synesthete, wrote his synesthesia into his characters on occasion, and some of his descriptions—such as the word “loyalty” suggesting “a golden fork lying in the sun”—indicate that this crossing of senses, infused with color, certainly influenced Nabokov’s construction of language. Words themselves could be beautiful or garish depending upon their letter-level construction.
Some scientists have postulated that this phenomenon of carrying meaning from one sense into another—which is essentially the definition of a metaphor—is universal and contains insight into the deepest workings of our minds. In the case of the common grapheme-color synesthesia, such as Nabokov’s, a likely explanation is the close proximity of portions of the fusiform gyrus that deal respectively with word and color recognition in the brain. When a synesthete reads a word, some of the electrical energy from that word-recognizing region is possibly leaping over into that color recognition region. One remarkable side effect of this is that many synesthetes tend to perceive the same colors for letters (“A” tends to be red), which underscores the structural theory—and might suggest that this same phenomenon is at work in all of us below the level of our conscious awareness.
While the causes of synesthesia remain unknown, it is generally agreed that the physical basis is a kind of excess of interconnectedness between neurons. It may be that the “pruning” we undergo as children does not complete, leaving connections behind that in the mainstream population are eradicated—but provoked synesthesia in the cases of drug use or epileptic seizures suggest that non-synesthesian brains are capable of synesthetic effects.
A 1929 experiment by Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler elegantly illustrates what some call our natural synesthesia. Köhler drew two random shapes: one spiky and sharp, the other flowing and rounded. He then asked subjects to guess of these shapes which one was called “kiki” and which was called “bouba.” The results were very clear: 95-98% of subjects identified the sharp shape as “kiki” and the rounded shape as “bouba.” (Fascinatingly, autistic individuals make this match only 56% of the time.)
Köhler’s experiment wrapped science around what we would call onomatopoeia: when a word sounds like what it is. But onomatopoeia is by definition synesthesia, the transference of sound into orthogonal meaning.
The modern neuroscientist Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran suggests that Köhler’s experiment shows that, to a certain extent, we are all synesthetes, and further that this inherent interconnection between our cognitive functions is intrinsic to the most beloved traits of humanity: compassion, creativity, ingenuity. What, after all, is an idea, but one flash of thought leaping across the mind to suggest novel possibility?
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
—Aristotle
So, if we’re all synesthetes, and our minds are extraordinarily plastic, capable of reorienting our entire perception around the addition of a single new concept (“there is a color between green and violet,” “schizophrenia is much more common than previously believed”), the implications of Homer’s wine-dark sea are rich indeed.
We are all creatures of our own time, our realities framed not by the limits of our knowledge but by what we choose to perceive. Do we yet perceive all the colors there are? What concepts are hidden from us by the convention of our language? When a noblewoman of Syracuse looked out across the Mare Siculum, did she see waves of Bacchanalian indigo beneath a sunset of hammered bronze? If a seagull flew east toward Thapsus, did she think of Venus and the fall of Troy?
The myriad details that define our everyday existence may define also the boundaries of our imagination, and with it our dreams, our ethics. We are lenses moving through time, beings of color and shadow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Hoffman is an author and game designer from California. Her fantasy series The Chaos Knight completes with its third volume, Shield of Sea and Space, in May 2013 from Pyr Books.
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Paul Weimer (@princejvstin) wrote on January 3rd, 2013 at 10:38 am:
Hi Erin!
A fascinating article. I remember reading years and years ago an article that suggested that the color Orange was relatively recent in history. I decided (I was young at the time) that I was misreading what the author was saying, and moved on. I never forgot that weird bit, though.
Maybe now I understand what the author meant, after your article...
Erin Hoffman wrote on January 8th, 2013 at 5:04 pm:
Thanks, Paul! Belated reply due to superbug+sinus infection.
Fun times.
Yes, orange is quite recent! In western civilization, anyway. I think it goes to the 1500s? But in Asia orange is ancient, and in ancient Egypt they had ochre (and I think in other ancient civs also). Wikipedia says this about orange in China, which is quite beautiful and fascinating:
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This concept of saffron being sacred probably came from India, where saffron and its color are the most sacred in Hinduism.
So orange is an interesting case of western exception, whereas it's quite common and identified in many civilizations outside of Europe much earlier. It's interesting to me, too, that we continue to come up with new colors, and I think they do tweak our thinking just slightly -- chartreuse came in 1838, magenta in 1859 -- and when these shades first appear they tend to move like wildfire through fashion as indicators of knowledge and power...
Glad you liked the article!
Erin Hoffman wrote on January 8th, 2013 at 5:04 pm:
Whoops, I forgot that angle brackets cause quotes to be eaten! Here's that quotation:
"In Confucianism, the religion and philosophy of ancient China, orange was the color of transformation. In China and India, the colour took its name not from the orange fruit, but from saffron, the finest and most expensive dye in Asia. According to Confucianism, existence was governed by the interaction of the male active principle, the yang, and the female passive principle, the yin. Yellow was the color of perfection and nobility; red was the colour of happiness and power. Yellow and red were compared to light and fire, spirituality and sensuality, seemingly opposite but really complementary. Out of the interaction between the two came orange, the color of transformation."
Andrew Paterson wrote on February 21st, 2013 at 10:48 am:
An interesting and thought-provoking article.
Was the sky always blue? If the sky was not blue then would the sea be blue - how much of the colour is reflection?
Homer may have been blind. If so, his colour references would have been a kind of double-shift, or double synaesthesia. His personal, internal, references would be an imaginary construct and any external descriptions he was given would be indexed accordingly. These are the references he would have at his disposal when describing the events in his poems. He had tasted and felt wine, and heard it described. (Wine connoisseurs and aesthetes in old Greece?) He compared the liquid and turbulent sea to wine that caused turbulence among men...
Rob wrote on June 7th, 2013 at 7:39 am:
This is an interesting post but I personally find it hard to believe that people didn't perceive those colours as we do today just because they weren't named.
If there wasn't much else around them that was blue they would just have thought that the sky was "sky coloured" and they didn't need another name for it.
Likewise the sea was sea-coloured and it's quite a different shade to the blue of the sky so perhaps people didn't make the connection between the two.
The sky also radiates light rather than reflecting it, so perhaps people didn't think of it as a colour for that reason. This would reinforce the link with a bronze shield for example which is highly reflective and seems to radiate light, as the sky does, even though the hue is different.
Also the colour of both the sky and the sea vary greatly depending on conditions. No doubt Homer was talking metaphorically and not literally saying the sea was red like wine - although that could have been possible depending on conditions. He was perhaps also highlighting that the to the sea appeared an unusual colour under at that particular moment.
It's interesting, but I think it's perhaps an example of people wanting to find a surprising and needlessly complicated explanation for something.
Jacob wrote on June 28th, 2013 at 6:08 am:
Wine-dark doesn't have to refer to hue. It can simply, as it says, be referring quite literally to the darkness. That is, deep waters look dark and (cumulatively) opaque from someone in a boat, like a cup with wine, not transparent to the bottom like a cup of water.
By the way, it was indigo, not yellow, Dr. Sacks reeferred—sorry, referred—to, unless that was a different trip:
"I had been reading about the color indigo, how it had been introduced into the spectrum by [Isaac] Newton rather late, and it seemed no two people quite agreed as to what indigo was, and I thought I would like to have an experience of indigo. And I built up a sort of pharmacological launchpad with amphetamines and LSD, and a little cannabis on top of that, and when I was really stoned I said, 'I want to see indigo now.' And as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo appeared on the wall.
"Again it had this luminous, numinous quality; I leaped toward it in a sort of ecstasy. I thought, 'This is the color of heaven.' ... I thought maybe this is not a color which actually exists on the Earth, or maybe it used to exist or no longer exists. All this went through my mind in 4 or 5 seconds, and then the blob disappeared, giving me a strong sense of loss and heartbrokenness, and I was haunted a little bit when I came down, wondering whether indigo did exist in the real world.
"I would turn over little stones. I once went to a museum to look at azurite, a copper mineral which is maybe the nearest [to] indigo, but that was disappointing. I did in fact have that experience again, but when I had it the second time, it was not with a drug, it was with music — and I think music can take one to the heights in a way comparable with drugs."
Mark Siegeltuch wrote on September 2nd, 2013 at 4:09 pm:
A nice piece about an important subject. Berlin and Kay wrote the first major study about culture and color perception back in the 1960s. All cultures inhabit symbolic worlds that mediate perception. There's no way around it. We learn to make sense of our world. Art preserves older sensory preferences the way fossils preserve the structure of plants and animals that no longer exist. Gregory Bateson pointed out that information is "any difference that makes a difference." We should distinguish between sense, nonsense, and non-sense. Most of the past and most other cultures fall into the third category for us. People make sense differently but we have trouble making sense of it because of our own biases. Learning is unlearning to a large extent.
chris wrote on October 24th, 2013 at 11:38 am:
...and here's under-educated me, always thinking that "wine-dark sea" meant storm-colored, as of a deep vat of new-pressed wine of a type prevalent in Homer's time that I simply didn't know about...
And for the bronze sky, I know I've read (but can't quote, memory fails me)modern Western fictions that speak of the bronze sky above, say, a drought-ridden desert or prairie. I imagine the whole sky becoming sun-colored.
I loved this article-- more please!
Ken wrote on October 31st, 2013 at 12:03 pm:
Why not consider the wine-dark sea as a beautiful metaphor for the wine-dark night skies and Homer's Odyssey as extended metaphor and the means by which the pre-literate Greeks preserved knowledge of astronomy and calendar-making that was essential to the organisation and well-being of their lives and societies.
The Greek need for such learning would have been as great as that of the Egyptians and Babylonians, a degree of whose astronomical learning is preserved in writing.
Web site: http://www.epicstars.org.uk
YouTube: Homer the Astronomer - 1 and Homer the Astronomer - 2.
Carl wrote on December 28th, 2013 at 12:46 am:
In addition to "novelist and synesthete" Vladimir Nabokov was a professional biologist, specializing in the lepidoptera. It isn't surprising his writing would interest his fellow scientists.
Danny wrote on February 7th, 2014 at 5:57 pm:
It's simply not true that the New Testament does not refer to the color blue. Revelation 9:16,17 says:
"The number of the armies of cavalry was two myriads of myriads;* I heard the number of them. And this is how I saw the horses in the vision and those seated on them: They had fire-red and hyacinth-blue and sulfur-yellow breastplates, and the heads of the horses were like the heads of lions,+ and fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths." (New World Translation)
Most ancient languages did not have words for the abstract colors themselves, but used objects that were that color to describe it. This is true of hyacinth blue. Hyacinth is a deep blue gemstone that is mentioned as one of the stones on Aaron's high priest breastplate, as well as the color of the breastplate here in Revelation.
Nick wrote on February 22nd, 2014 at 12:07 pm:
Perhaps the hippocampus is less competent at making memories of things we don't have words for.
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and the New Testament in Greek.
The New World Translation has probably altered the wording to make it easier to understand for today's readers.
In any case, I can't imagine any language where a literal word-for-word translation into English or vice versa could be done.
It's possible that different colour-names are used in the original Greek, where 'blue' and 'yellow' probably hadn't yet been added to the language.
Erin Hoffman wrote on February 22nd, 2014 at 1:03 pm:
Wow, I haven't kept up with these comments, apologies, all.
Further to what Nick has said, Danny, my understanding of the blue-in-the-Bible issue as represented by scholars who are far more educated on this than I, is that there is a sharp distinction between purple and blue. Hyacinth, whose reference in ancient Greek was the flower, is what we would call purple, not blue; referring to a "hyacinth blue" is a modern term. Tekhelet in Hebrew, for turquoise, is often referred to in modern translations as blue, but is actually green if you look at what the ancients were referring to when they talked about the color. It is not disputed that they were familiar with multiple shades of purple and green, and it does seem to be our modern translations that sometimes muddle this into blue, masking the point that these sources are making about ancient perception.
I agree with Chris and Ken that unless you dig beneath the surface of these translations the natural assumption is that Homer is being metaphorical. But looking at the whole text suggests otherwise. And that seems to me to be what is most fascinating about it -- that language which begins very concrete can through the ages become very abstract and metaphorical, not because it was originally intended that way (or who can know exactly its intent and the scheme in which the language was originally viewed), but because our language and perception are both mutable things that vary not just between individuals but between millennia.
Jonathan Tweet wrote on March 24th, 2014 at 11:14 am:
Hi Erin
Great article. I found it when I was researching the evolution of color vision. I love thinking about ancient Hebrews and Greeks, too, so this article is a nice roundup of interesting things. Here's my contribution to the conversation:
Maybe "blue" got overlooked because the blue sky is a blank background against which we discern the things we care about: white clouds, green trees, a green horizon, etc. Even when our ancestors were fish, blue light was often the background against which they saw other animals in the water, at least when looking up. So maybe we tend to discount blue as the negative space by which things are defined. Like, the sky is a "blue screen." Really interesting lines of thought here.
As for the sky being bronze, the ancient Hebrews thought that the "firmament" was made of metal. Maybe Homer and the Greeks thought that the solid, smooth dome of the sky was made of bronze, or a metal like bronze.
It's hard to believe that people without a word for blue would not perceive blue. Other animals don't have words for any colors, or even brightness, but they have color vision.
Thanks again for a great piece.
John wrote on April 18th, 2014 at 1:42 pm:
Colours in the Celtic languages don't quite parallel those in other languages.
Scottish Gaelic.
Ruadh Dark Red
Dearg Light Red
Would a native speaker not see them as different shades of the same colour? Even the little of the language I learned as an adult does seem to affect the way I see the world when I use it.
Uaine Bright Green
Gorm Blue, Blue-Green, Grass Green
Glas Dark Grey, Green-Grey
Liath Light Grey, Blue-Grey
Cathie wrote on August 11th, 2014 at 5:50 pm:
My boyfriend is colorblind, and he can be pretty off when he's trying to guess what color something is, especially in poor lighting, but he knows the names of colors far better than the average person. For example, when asking what color something is, he doesn't say "orange" or "brown." He'll say "burnt orange." I find it fascinating (as was your article.) Even though his eyes don't see the colors, his brain does through language.
Cathie wrote on August 11th, 2014 at 5:51 pm:
btw - wasn't the wine of ancient Greece and Rome darker than what we have today?
Briana wrote on November 2nd, 2014 at 5:24 pm:
Erin, were you involved in the RadioLab podcast about this subject?
I too was skeptical at first, but by the end I was convinced.