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Dardanelles,
near Troy (left) ebar |
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The Wine-Dark Sea Homer makes sparing use of the adjective "wine-colored" to refer to the sea and to oxen. Like the color of ancient wine, the color that the poet had in mind is unclear. Yet certainly the phrase evokes the sea’s mystery and intoxication, in English made more poetic by the nineteenth-century translation, "wine-dark." Authors such as Thomas Cahill, Patrick O’Brian, and Leonardo Sciascia have used the phrase in book titles. The Wine-Dark Sea is just the right description of the waters which the Greeks ruled and on which they died. It is just a short step from "wine-dark" to "blood-stained," an adjective used by Aeschylus in his description of the sea at Salamis. The wine-dark sea is a place of many undiscovered secrets, and one of them is Salamis: the world’s first great multicultural battle, in which the men of three continents met – and one woman, the first female admiral in history. Another secret of the wine-dark sea is the trireme, the oared warship that dominated the Mediterranean in the classical age, including the battle of Salamis in 480 B.C. A great deal of information about this remarkable ship has been passed down from ancient times, but it is tantalizingly incomplete. Recently scholars have made enormous progress in understanding the trireme. In the 1980s, a hypothetical reconstruction, Olympias was built and rowed in Greek waters for several trial seasons. But although over one thousand ancient shipwrecks have been found in the Mediterranean, no trireme is among them. Currently, underwater archaeologists are hoping to find the first trireme wreck off the stormy coast of northern Greece. •
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