....on close inspection, Homeric terms that appear to describe the color of the sea, have more to do with light. The sea is often glaukós or mélas. In Homer, glaukós (whence glaucoma) is color neutral, meaning “shining” or “gleaming,” although in later Greek it comes to mean “gray.” Mélas (whence
melancholy) is “dark in hue, dark,” sometimes, perhaps crudely,
translated as “black.” It is used of a range of things associated with
water—ships, the sea, the rippled surface of the sea, “the dark hue of
water as seen by transmitted light with little or no reflection from the
surface.” It is also, as we have seen, commonly used of wine.
So what color is the sea? Silver-pewter at dawn; gray, gray-blue,
green-blue, or blue depending on the particular day; yellow or red at
sunset; silver-black at dusk; black at night. In other words, no color
at all, but rather a phenomenon of reflected light. The phrase
“winelike,” then, had little to do with color but must have evoked some
attribute of dark wine that would resonate with an audience familiar
with the sea—with the póntos, the high sea, that perilous path
to distant shores—such as the glint of surface light on impenetrable
darkness, like wine in a terracotta vessel. Thus, when Achilles,
“weeping, quickly slipping away from his companions, sat /on the shore
of the gray salt sea,” stretches forth his hands toward the oínopa pónton,
he looks not on the enigmatic “winedark sea,” but, more explicitly, and
possibly with more weight of melancholy, on a “sea as dark as wine.”
- Caroline Alexander
(I find Lapham's deeply, utterly annoying but I went out and bought the Sea issue just on the strength of this essay.)
descensus Averno facilis est