ABSTRACT
Anyone who has ever read Homer knows the constancy of the sea mocks the flux of human existence. Heroes and cities rise and fall, empires come and go, but the “wine-dark sea” remains. Homer first uses the now-famous epithet when Achilles turns to look “out over the sea” before the funeral of his beloved Patroclus (ἐπὶ ο ἴνοπα πόντον, Iliad 23:143). 1 It recurs in some of the most emotionally fraught passages in the Odyssey. When Telemachus sets out for Pylos, Athena sends him a west wind sounding “over the wine-dark sea” (Odyssey 2:421). When Odysseus’ men eat the cattle of the Sun, Zeus vows to destroy their ship “in the middle of the wine-dark sea,” a phrase that Kalypso and Odysseus later echo in describing the same event (Odyssey 12:388, 7:250, 5:221). The wine-dark sea becomes the one constant in these poems recounting the loss of countless human lives. The epithet still resonates so powerfully that over a dozen recent works adopt it in their titles, including a novel by Patrick O’Brien, a popular history by Thomas Cahill, a documentary about monk seals, a collection of horror stories by Robert Aikman, a song by electronic musician Suzanne Ciani, and a rock symphony by Stephen Caudel. Each work in its own way evokes Homer’s phrase as a gesture toward timelessness.
