This is a really great explanation, but could you also add a few references? That would help greatly.
Maybe start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry
That’s hard a lot of this is knowledge from my Classics days.
There are other theories about Homeric verse. Scholars are pretty sure about formulaic composition explaining some features of Homer. It passes the sniff test and is a simple explanation to a lot of artifacts in the Homeric texts. Some analysis of Homer is misguided since it wasn’t made as a written work. This isn’t a universal belief among scholars today afaik, but it’s a defensible position.
Indeed. Moreover, I'm not (so) ancient and the words made sense to me instantly with no dissonance. Deep sea is purple and dark. Some wines are also purple-leaning. The association is very obvious unless you insist in "wines are red, seas are blue" or you come to analyze verses with a spectrometer.
> We think of epic poetry as some kind of high literature. They were more like Marvel movies of the day.
Homer was considered the highest litterature at the time, so I’m not sure what this analogy means?
"highest" in what sense?
Marvel makes the best-made literature of our time, from a professional craftsmanship perspective.
“High litterature” tend to mean litterature with high prestige among elites and long-lasting cultural impact.
Good for you if you appreciate Marvel-branded content, but it doesn’t make Marvel Homer.
The closest analogy to marvel movies would probably be satyr plays.
The thing to understand here is that the ancient people who would have heard these words from a poet did not drink wine as we understand it.
Wine was a concentrated product added to water for consumption. This did a few things, but the important ones are condense calories, make the water safe to drink, and the concentrated wine product was easier to store and ship. Wine dark means this stuff.
We think of epic poetry as some kind of high literature. They were more like Marvel movies of the day. Wine dark is not a fanciful metaphor, but rather something the audience understood and fit into the meter.
Homeric verse had to fit into dactylic hexameter. Easy phrases are sprinkled throughout Epic poetry that make the scantion work out. Wine-dark sea is one of them. Swift-footed Achilles and Rosy-fingered dawn are some other notable examples.
These phrases are used when it makes no sense. The Iliad talks about Swift footed Achilles sitting down, so arguments that meter isn’t determining turns of phrase is simply wrong. It’s just an epithet that fit into the scantion.
These are really long poems that were recited, from memory to audiences. Memory was their primary storage. So there are a lot of “go-to” easy phrases that are really just vamping, but since it’s thousands of years old we want it to mean more.