"Epi oinopa ponton," a phrase used often in Homer's
Odyssey, means “upon the wine-colored sea,” which the
poem's English-language translators have often rendered as
"wine-dark." Mulligan’s attribution in Telemachus,
“snotgreen,” casts a sarcastic light on this venerated epic
coloring of the ocean. But Stephen recalls the phrase in Proteus
and restores its Homeric tinge: "oinopa ponton, a
winedark sea."
As the novel progresses, Stephen continues to brood on the
phrase. In Wandering Rocks he looks through a
jeweller's window at dust piled on "dull coils of bronze and
silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark
stones." In Ithaca he sits across from
Bloom and sees a Christ-figure "with winedark hair,"
the darkness perhaps speaking to the metaphysical darkness that he
pondered in Nestor. In Cyclops, the
Citizen too recalls this phrase as he pontificates about Irish
trade in beer and wine with the Continent: "the winebark on the
winedark waterway."
Epi oinopa ponton is one of many formulaic epithets
that the Homeric bards used as easily remembered and
metrically friendly crutches to fill spaces in lines. Many of
these epithets in the Iliad and the Odyssey
involve color, as Joyce may have noted when he called the
Blooms' chamberpot "orangekeyed."
