Wine, travel and the sea of ​​Homer

I would love to one day be able to explain the origin of the word "wine"—which, unchanged, adorns the tables of every Indo-European language—but I always stumble upon the astonishment that Homer's sea is not green, nor azure blue, nor indigo, nor navy blue, but οἶνοψ πόντος (oînops póntos) : "sea of ​​wine-colored eyes," purple. The arcane and strange poetic nature of οἶνοψ πόντος inspires, dazzles, and intrigues, and its difficult interpretation has led dozens of writers, historians, and archaeologists to attempt to unravel the meaning of such mysterious chromatic contamination. Indeed, unlike other formulas repeatedly used by the Blind Man of Chios, this color, reminiscent of passion, disorients and intoxicates. What did Homer mean when he surgically chose the combination of these two words, adjective and noun, οἶνοψ πόντος, to describe the sea?

The Vatican Secret Archives, or, as it is known among academics, infinitus enim thesaurus , is in fact an immense library of silent shelves, which expands, branches and contracts for forty kilometers, between wonders and trivialities: manuscripts on parchment and paper, bulls, admonitions, encyclicals, shopping lists, deeds and endless fictions record the ebb and flow of history, its high tides and low tides, revolutions, crimes and excommunications; war chronicles and peace proposals; palace disputes and love affairs.

The Secret Archive began to take shape in the days of the Christian struggle against Imperial Rome and continues to this day with the details and appointments of Chinese prelates: from the letter of Empress Ming, written in 1655 on a yellow silk sheet, in which she requests the sending of more Jesuit missionaries to assist in the conversions, to the story of Pope Clement recounting his journey to Crimea, where he continued to preach until the Roman guards tied a millstone around his neck and threw him to the bottom of the sea, where angels built him a watery tomb – it all can be found in the Miscellany and other unnameable fondi .

Lucila Montefiori, the most brilliant expert on ancient libraries and their preservation, was called to Rome to solve a great mystery: in the Hall of Parchments, adjacent to the Tower of the Winds, thousands of documents displayed a purplish hue caused by a violet fungus that no one had been able to control, much less identify. Over time, and if its advance were not halted, what was still legible would be lost in a growing sea of ​​violet, illegible and cold. It was relatively easy to combat the woodworm or the moth, whose voracity has extended its voracious hunger for centuries: it was easy to seal off a room and isolate a few shelves, but on a fine day, or a bad night, first the faded violet stains and then the purple ones would advance again, absorbing in their wake the letters written by Zosimus, Leo, and Urban: petitions for divorce, permission to break fasts, and annals that speak of barbarian peoples who had not yet known Christianity.

Just as blotting paper darkens and softens when touched by water or ink, manuscripts attacked by the violet fungus softened and darkened. At first, Lucilla thought she was dealing with a mutation of Clitocybe nuda , whose spores had reached the Secret Archives during the Napoleonic invasion, spores that thrived on the echoes of the dead and the anxiety of the living. It seemed obvious that the illuminated violet parchments with gold lettering from the time of Charlemagne were safe from this dangerous invasion, as if violet were a true antidote to violet. Later, when the dye appeared on a distant shelf, Lucilla Montefiori realized that insects and fungi do not follow a rational plan, nor do they obey a geometric progression: any breeze stimulates them, any darkness excites them. The Carolingian background, therefore, had been spared for other reasons.

In the Archives itself, the English librarian read Goethe's color theories and Portal, the Vitae Magorum , by Randall the Crooked, since, Lucilla believed, one could not rule out ancient sabotage, a bibliophobic plague, a sorcery from the Central Asian steppes, or the introduction, during the 1917 revolution, of a poison made from lichens and mosses that thrives in books and ink. Where science fails, Lucilla thought, superstition is reborn. When books are attacked, it won't be long before humans are too.

When she stumbled upon Philostratus 's Life of Apollonius of Tyana , whose biography closely resembled that of Jesus—so much so that his native language was Aramaic, he wore loose clothing, led an ascetic life, healed the sick, cast out demons, resurrected the daughter of a Roman centurion, and considered himself the savior of humanity—and upon this far-fetched notion that the dead go to heavens of different colors, the highest being violet, Lucilla imagined that the deceased present there, preserved in their names and titles, eminent figures and explorers of portents and meticulous rites, formed a sinister plasma made of revenge and resentment. In other words, the highest heaven in which they found themselves felt nostalgia for the deepest part of the library, composed of certain sections of the Secret Archive. Somehow, the dead and other ghosts felt once again close to what had been their world: the courtyards, the baldachins, the gardens, the convents, the palaces that the books kept between their wounded pages.

He tried to restore them to their proper place with powders, mothballs, aromatic herbs, and bactericides, but nothing could retrace the path to the islands, circles, and ovals that the violet fungus colonized along the way, as if it were the vanguard of an army conquering the darkness and the dissolution of letters. Finally, after consulting the cardinals, secretaries, and scholars who worked there, he decided to copy what was still salvageable, what could still be deciphered. The copies would, of course, not be like the originals, just as, although similar to him, being his contemporary, miracle worker, healer, and poet, Apollonius of Tyana was nothing more than a mockery of Jesus, the rabbi of Nazareth.

What does it matter where, how, when, and why Homer gave the sea the color of passion and pain? It's not necessary to consult a philologist to understand why our Mediterranean, the mare nostrum , hasn't shone blue since Homer's time, but instead cries out in scandal for the blood, mixed with its salt, of the thousands of migrants who, like Ulysses, have sought, for centuries, a better fate than war and a violated city like Troy. Instead of raising our glasses, perhaps we should lower our cynicism and arrogance.

Homer coined the most poignant of expressions to describe the eyes—the key to the epithet—of those who look to the sea for salvation. Ecstasy and fear, that's what one feels when looking at the sea—not wine, but blood in the eyes, like οἶνοψ —which derives from wine , but also from ὄψ (óps) , the eye that contemplates the expanse of water to be crossed.

Ten years ago this month, the body of Aylan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Kurdish boy whose swollen, purple face reminds us that the same color can kill and resurrect, dissolve a trace of memory and teach the humble courage of dignity for the justice of Philostratus's last heaven, was thrown onto a Turkish beach like an inert stump.