---
slug: wine-dark-sea
passed: 2026-10-11
by: claude-vibrant-lamport-79znpp, two independent Claude checkers on oversight/claims-pass.md (source first, every claim the page makes), an adjudicator who re-read each finding at its source and a skeptic who tried to make the page right; every HIGH and every lone WRONG re-read by the instance at the source before fixing; fixes made by a fixer agent and read against the sources by a separate fix-checker
checked: 61
confirmed: 35
wrong: 22
unverifiable: 0
observed: 4
stale: 0
---
# Claims pass: The Colour of the Sea

Reader-side check, run by both checkers and the adjudicator with the same result: in an empty directory, `curl -sSL -o verify.mjs https://artwaste.land/checks/research/wine-dark-sea/verify.mjs` returned 200, 7,303 bytes, byte-identical to research/wine-dark-sea/verify.mjs, and `node verify.mjs` exited 1 with ENOENT on ../../public/strata/wine-dark-sea/index.html, no checks run. The excerpts it reads are not served (greek-perseus.txt and gladstone-1858-colour.txt return 404 under /checks/). The placard says running it needs the repository, so this is disclosed, not broken. In the repository it printed 22/22 (exit 0), and 0/22 with index.html emptied in a scratch copy. Step 6 does not apply: the page never prints the verifier's output. Sentence-only probes (“12× in all” to 99×, “1614–1919” to 1614–2099, “in the bud only” to “in full bloom”) still printed 22/22, since the verifier checked no figure, date or locus; that is how three rows quoting the wrong passage passed.

Of 61 claims, 35 held, 4 are OBSERVED, 8 are WRONG and 14 MINOR, the MINOR lines counted as wrong; the skeptic tried to make the page right on all eight WRONG findings and upheld each. The corrections: Gladstone's “in the bud only” is about the picturesque, not colour (F1); Butcher & Lang did not coin “wine-dark sea”, which Worsley printed at the same line in 1861 (F2); the Cowper and Pope rows at Od. 1.183 and the Chapman row at Il. 2.613 quoted other passages (F3, F5, F6), and the Cowper paragraph called a misty sea his wine sea (F4); οἶνοψ is used of the sea 17 times, not 12 (F7); Geiger's lecture is 1867, not 1877 (F8). The MINOR findings include the 1614–1919 span, three refusers where the page shows two, “a dozen ways”, the verifier's “each quotation” and “no third-party requests”. All 22 were fixed and none was declined or held by a note. A dated “Corrected 2026-10-11” note records the eight WRONG corrections, and the verifier now passes 37/37, with checks that fail on each WRONG claim's old text.

## Claims
- CONFIRMED | “Homer's sea is οἶνοψ — wine-faced, the famous “wine-dark sea.”” | Perseus grc2: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml (Odyssey); https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml (Iliad) | Od. 1.183 “πλέων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον ἐπʼ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους,”; Il. 2.613 “νῆας ἐϋσσέλμους περάαν ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον”
- CONFIRMED | οἶνοψ < οἶνος (wine) + ὄψ (face / look) · gen. οἴνοπος | LSJ via Logeion API: https://anastrophe.uchicago.edu/logeion-api/detail?w=οἶνοψ | “οἶνοψ, οπος, ὁ, (ὄψ) wine-coloured, Hom. (never in nom.) epith. of the sea, wine-dark, Il. 23.316, Od. 5.132, 2.421; of oxen, wine-red, deep-red, βόε οἴνοπε Il. 13.703, Od. 13.32”; LSJ derives it from ὄψ (B), 'eye, face', not ὄψ (A), 'voice'. The page also flags the sense of ὄψ as debated.
- CONFIRMED | an epithet, never a noun | LSJ via Logeion API: https://anastrophe.uchicago.edu/logeion-api/detail?w=οἶνοψ; Perseus grc2 Od. 21.144: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml | LSJ “epith. of the sea ... of oxen”; Od. 21.144 “Λειώδης δὲ πρῶτος ἀνίστατο, Οἴνοπος υἱός,”; True of the common word. The same form is also a personal name (Oenops).
- CONFIRMED | ἰοειδής, violet (Od. 5.56, 11.107) | Perseus grc2 Odyssey: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml | Od. 5.56 “ἔνθʼ ἐκ πόντου βὰς ἰοειδέος ἤπειρόνδε”; Od. 11.107 “Θρινακίῃ νήσῳ, προφυγὼν ἰοειδέα πόντον,”
- CONFIRMED | πολιή, grey … Il. 1.350 ἁλὸς πολιῆς / where Achilles weeps by “the grey sea” | Perseus grc2 Iliad: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml | Il. 1.350 “θῖνʼ ἔφʼ ἁλὸς πολιῆς, ὁρόων ἐπʼ ἀπείρονα πόντον·”
- MINOR | μέλας … “the dark, deep water — Homer's commonest reach” (loc “passim (e.g. μέλαν ὕδωρ)”) | Perseus grc2: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml; https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml; recreated: accent-stripped grep over both, lines pairing the colour word with a sea-word (adjudicator scratch scripts) | μέλας of the sea itself ≈5-6 lines (Il. 23.693, 24.79 “ἔνθορε μείλανι πόντῳ”, Od. 5.353, 12.104); πολιός with a sea-word 25 lines; οἶνοψ of the sea 17; F21. True of μέλας as Homer's commonest colour word overall; false read as his commonest colour for the sea, which is how the swatch reads.
- CONFIRMED | It is never, not once, blue | LSJ γλαυκός via Logeion API: https://anastrophe.uchicago.edu/logeion-api/detail?w=γλαυκός | “γλαυκός, ή, όν, orig. without any notion of colour, gleaming ... once in Hom., γλαυκὴ δέ σε τίκτε θάλασσα Il. 16.34”; Holds on LSJ's reading. See F20 on the swatch label.
- MINOR | (γλαυκή θάλασσα;) shown in the blue cell beside “never, in either poem” | Perseus grc2 Il. 16.34: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml; LSJ via Logeion API: https://anastrophe.uchicago.edu/logeion-api/detail?w=γλαυκός | Il. 16.34 “οὐδὲ Θέτις μήτηρ· γλαυκὴ δέ σε τίκτε θάλασσα”; F20. Homer writes the phrase once; LSJ: 'gleaming'.
- MINOR | Homer paints the same sea four ways and never the fifth. Gladstone (1858) counted exactly this | Perseus grc2; https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53004/pg53004.txt line 16511 | Il. 16.391 “ἐς δʼ ἅλα πορφυρέην”; Od. 13.85 “πορφύρεον μέγα θῦε πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης”; Gladstone under πορφύρεος: “Wave of the sea, Il. i. 482; and the disturbed sea, Il. xvi. 391.”; F19.
- WRONG | Od. 1.183 · Il. 2.613 · 12× in all | Perseus grc2: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml; https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml; recreated: python3 -I flat.py + count.py over tlg0012.tlg001/tlg002, regex (?<!\w)οινοπ/(?<!\w)οινοψ on accent-stripped text | Sea: Il. 2.613, 5.771, 7.88, 23.143, 23.316; Od. 1.183, 2.421, 3.286, 4.474, 5.132, 5.221, 5.349, 6.170, 7.250, 12.388, 19.172, 19.274 (17); oxen Il. 13.703, Od. 13.32; F7. 12 is the Odyssey-only count.
- CONFIRMED | νῦν δʼ ὧδε ξὺν νηὶ κατήλυθον … πλέων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον ἐπʼ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους | Perseus grc2 Od. 1.182-183: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml | “νῦν δʼ ὧδε ξὺν νηὶ κατήλυθον ἠδʼ ἑτάροισιν / πλέων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον ἐπʼ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους,”
- MINOR | Athena, disguised as Mentes, tells how she came “sailing over the wine-faced sea” to the men of Temesa. | Perseus grc2 Od. 1.182-184: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml | “νῦν δʼ ὧδε ξὺν νηὶ κατήλυθον … πλέων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον ἐπʼ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους, ἐς Τεμέσην μετὰ χαλκόν”; F22. She put in at Ithaca while bound for Temesa.
- CONFIRMED | αὐτὸς γάρ σφιν δῶκεν … νῆας ἐϋσσέλμους περάαν ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον; Agamemnon gives the landlocked Arcadians the ships to cross “the wine-faced sea.” | Perseus grc2 Il. 2.612-614: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml | “αὐτὸς γάρ σφιν δῶκεν ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν Ἀγαμέμνων / νῆας ἐϋσσέλμους περάαν ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον / Ἀτρεΐδης, ἐπεὶ οὔ σφι θαλάσσια ἔργα μεμήλει.”
- CONFIRMED | Loci: οἴνοπα πόντον at Od. 1.183, Il. 2.613; οἴνοπι πόντῳ Od. 5.132; ἁλὸς πολιῆς Il. 1.350; ἰοειδέος / ἰοειδέα πόντον Od. 5.56, 11.107 (Perseus/Scaife perseus-grc2) | Perseus grc2 XML: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml; https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml | Od. 5.132 “Ζεὺς ἔλσας ἐκέασσε μέσῳ ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ.” (other loci as quoted above)
- CONFIRMED | Butcher & Lang 1879 at Od. 1.183: “sailing over the wine-dark sea, unto men of strange speech, even to Temesa” | https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1728/1728-0.txt lines 884-885 | “And now am I come to shore, as thou seest, with ship and crew, sailing over the wine-dark sea, unto men of strange speech, even to Temesa,[2] in quest of copper”
- WRONG | Butcher & Lang (1879) coin the “wine-dark sea” we all quote / keep the colour and coin the phrase we all quote / coined “wine-dark sea” in 1879 | https://archive.org/download/odysseyhomer05worsgoog/odysseyhomer05worsgoog_djvu.txt (Worsley, vol. I, Blackwood MDCCCLXI); https://archive.org/download/greekenglishle00lidd/greekenglishle00lidd_djvu.txt (L&S, Harper 1846) | Worsley 1861, Od. 1.183: “Hither, in sailing o'er the wine-dark sea / To men far off, who stranger tongues indite.”; L&S 1846: “coloured, wine-dark, in Hom.”; F2.
- CONFIRMED | Cowper renders it “sable” | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24269/pg24269.txt lines 1230, 3162, 3270 vs Perseus Od. 2.421, 5.132, 5.221 | “The sable Deep, and, sounding, swept the waves.” (Od. 2.421 κελάδοντʼ ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον); “Had cleft his bark amid the sable Deep.” (Od. 5.132 ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ); “But should some God amid the sable Deep” (Od. 5.221); True in general; false only for the line and locus the instrument shows (F3).
- WRONG | Cowper 1791 at Odyssey 1.183: “A voyage o’er the sable Deep in quest / Of tidings of my long regretted Sire” | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24269/pg24269.txt lines 1036-1039 (Book II) and 314-318 (Book I); Perseus grc2 Od. 2.263 | The line is Od. 2.262-264, “καί μʼ ἐν νηὶ κέλευσας ἐπʼ ἠεροειδέα πόντον”. Cowper's real Od. 1.183: “Seeking a people of another tongue / Athwart the gloomy flood, in quest of brass”; F3.
- WRONG | Cowper (1791), in two adjacent lines of his Odyssey, sets Homer's grey sea and his wine sea side by side … “the gray Deep” and then “the sable Deep” | Perseus grc2 Od. 2.261, 2.263: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml; https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24269/pg24269.txt lines 1034, 1038 | Od. 2.261 “χεῖρας νιψάμενος πολιῆς ἁλὸς”; Od. 2.263 “ἐπʼ ἠεροειδέα πόντον”; Cowper “in the surf of the gray Deep” … “A voyage o'er the sable Deep in quest”; F4. The second sea is ἠεροειδής (misty), not οἶνοψ.
- CONFIRMED | Butler 1900 at Od. 1.183: “on a voyage to men of a foreign tongue being bound for Temesa with a cargo of iron” (epithet dropped) | https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1727/1727-0.txt lines 523, 299 | “I have come here with my ship and crew, on a voyage to men of a foreign tongue being bound for Temesa4 with a cargo of iron, and I shall bring back copper.”; “Butler’s Translation of the “Odyssey” appeared originally in 1900”
- WRONG | Pope 1725 at Odyssey 1.183: “And let me now regain the Reithrian port; / From Temese return’d, your royal court” | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3160/pg3160.txt lines 1519-1524 and 1333-1342; Perseus grc2 Od. 1.315 | The couplet renders Od. 1.315ff “μή μʼ ἔτι νῦν κατέρυκε, λιλαιόμενόν περ ὁδοῖο.” Pope's real Od. 1.183: “Freighted with iron from my native land, / I steer my voyage to the Brutian strand”; F5. The 'dropped' verdict survives at the real locus.
- MINOR | Pope (1715–20, Gutenberg 6130) in the apparatus; the Odyssey row credited to Pope | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah_Fenton; the page's own row (ed:'Gutenberg 3160') | Fenton “'Englished' the first, fourth, nineteenth, and twentieth books” of Pope's Odyssey; F16. The apparatus omits Gutenberg 3160, and Book I is Fenton's.
- CONFIRMED | Buckley 1851 at Il. 2.613: “gave them the well-benched ships, to pass over the dark sea; since they had no care of naval works” | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22382/pg22382.txt lines 1791-1793 | “Agamemnon himself, the king of heroes, gave them the well-benched ships, to pass over the dark sea; since they had no care of naval works.”
- CONFIRMED | Pope 1715 at Il. 2.613: “Their ships, supplied by Agamemnon’s care, / Through roaring seas the wondering warriors bear” | https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-0.txt lines 3747-3748 | “Their ships, supplied by Agamemnon’s care, / Through roaring seas the wondering warriors bear;”
- WRONG | Chapman 1615 under Iliad 2.613: “the wine-hued seas · (elsewhere) the sable seas” | https://archive.org/download/iliadsofhomerpri01homeuoft/iliadsofhomerpri01homeuoft_djvu.txt; https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48895/pg48895.txt (“The Odysseys of Homer”) | Chapman's Iliads at Il. 2.612-614: “King Agamemnon, on these men, did well-built ships bestow / To pass the gulfy purple sea, that did no sea rites know.”; F6. Both quoted phrases are from his Odyssey (3.286, 6.170).
- CONFIRMED | Chapman … rendered the very same epithet “the wine-hued seas” in one place and “the sable seas” in another | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48895/pg48895.txt lines 2301 (Book III), 4838 (Book VI); Perseus grc2 Od. 3.286, 6.170 | “But sailing still the wine-hued seas,[2]” = Od. 3.286 “ἰὼν ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον”; “Since I, at length, escap’d the sable seas;” = Od. 6.170 “φύγον ἤματι οἴνοπα πόντον”; The excerpt's other 'sable seas' (Book V, line 4362) renders κύματι πηγῷ (Od. 5.388), not οἶνοψ.
- CONFIRMED | Chapman, the first man to carry all of Homer into English (1614–15) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chapman (A); Hooper intro, archive.org iliadsofhomerpri01homeuoft (B) | “In 1616 the complete Iliad and Odyssey appeared in The Whole Works of Homer, the first complete English translation”; 1614–15 dates the Odyssey that completed his Homer; the collected Whole Works is 1616.
- MINOR | 6 hands · 1614–1919 | https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1727/1727-0.txt line 299; page apparatus index.html:273 | “Butler’s Translation of the “Odyssey” appeared originally in 1900”; F9. The latest hand is 1900. The only 1919 item is Murray's Greek text behind Perseus.
- CONFIRMED | The epithet survives in exactly half the hands. | public/strata/wine-dark-sea/index.html (the four Od. 1.183 rows, as checked), recreated: arithmetic on the rows, re-done with the true lines from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24269/pg24269.txt (Cowper) and https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3160/pg3160.txt (Pope) | B&L keep, Cowper keep (true line “gloomy flood”), Butler drop, Pope drop (true line “Brutian strand”) = 2 of 4
- MINOR | Six public-domain translators decided, and decided differently, and three of them quietly refused to decide at all | public/strata/wine-dark-sea/index.html:343-346 (instrument rows) and :408 (caption), line numbers as checked | “<b>Butler</b> and <b>Pope</b> drop the sea's colour altogether”; F10. Two translators, not three.
- MINOR | cross into English a dozen different ways: wine-dark, sable, dark, roaring, or gone | public/strata/wine-dark-sea/index.html:338-360 (instrument) and :228 (body), line numbers as checked | “Switch the locus; watch the same word land five different ways.”; F11.
- CONFIRMED | In 1858 a future British Prime Minister, W. E. Gladstone | https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/william-ewart-gladstone; Gutenberg 53004 title | “1868 to 1874, 1880 to 1885, 1886 to 1886, 1892 to 1894”
- CONFIRMED | W. E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, vol. III (1858) | https://archive.org/download/studiesonhomerho03glad/studiesonhomerho03glad_djvu.txt | “STUDIES ON HOMER AND THE HOMERIC AGE ... IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III ... OXFORD: AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. M.DCCC.LVIII.”
- CONFIRMED | “Now we must at once be struck with the poverty of the list … out of these nine, three at least stand unrepresented.” | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53004/pg53004.txt; IA scan studiesonhomerho03glad p. 459 | “Now we must at once be struck with the poverty of the list which has just been given, upon comparing it with our own list of primary colours … Out of these nine, three at least stand unrepresented.”
- MINOR | counting them against the nine of the modern prism / against the nine of the prism | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53004/pg53004.txt (p. 459) | “1. Red. … 7. Violet. To these we are to add-- 8. White, the compound of all colours; 9. Black, the negative or absence of them all.”; F12. Seven plus white and black.
- CONFIRMED | “finds at least three colours “unrepresented” — no fixed green, no blue” | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53004/pg53004.txt and its Transcriber's Note | “And thus orange, green, and blue would remain without any corresponding terms.”; note: “p. 459 "and violet" changed to "and blue"”; The 1858 print's “violet” is an evident slip given his own table; the page follows the evident sense.
- WRONG | he concluded the colour-sense itself was “in the bud only” | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53004/pg53004.txt line 15127 (vol. III p. 419) and lines 17492-17493 | “At the same time I admit that the feeling with Homer is one in the bud only” (on the picturesque, answering Ruskin). On colour: “I conclude, then, that the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.”; F1. The phrase occurs once in vol. III and not at all in vols. I-II.
- CONFIRMED | Gladstone counted Homer's colour words and concluded the Greek colour sense was undeveloped | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53004/pg53004.txt lines 17492-17493 | “I conclude, then, that the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.”
- CONFIRMED | no settled word for green, none for blue, a sea the colour of wine and oxen the colour of wine and a sky of bronze and iron | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53004/pg53004.txt lines 16906, 17263, 17306-17310 | “For oxen, in Il. xiii. 703, and Od. xiii. 32.”; “His οὐρανὸς is starry … or iron (Od. xv. 328), or copper (Od. iii. 2. Il. xvii. 425); but it is never blue.”
- WRONG | 1877: Geiger generalises it; L. Geiger, lectures on the development of colour-sense (1870s) | https://archive.org/download/contributionstoh00geiguoft/contributionstoh00geiguoft_djvu.txt (Geiger 1829-1870, tr. 1880); https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED019655.pdf | “[Read before the Meeting of German Naturalists at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, September 24, 1867.]”; preface: “my late brother … when death overtook him” (June 1871); B&K: “Lazarus Geiger (1867)” and “Magnus [1877]”; F8.
- MINOR | extends Gladstone’s observation across the Vedas, the Bible, the Norse sagas | https://archive.org/download/contributionstoh00geiguoft/contributionstoh00geiguoft_djvu.txt (lecture III) | “Nor is the blue sky mentioned in the Edda hymns.” (footnote); body cites the Veda hymns, the Zendavesta, the Bible, Homer; F13. The Edda's poems, not sagas.
- CONFIRMED | Geiger extends Gladstone’s observation … blue, he reports, is the last colour to be named in language after language | Geiger 1880 translation (tr. Asher), lecture III pp. 52-54: https://archive.org/download/contributionstoh00geiguoft/contributionstoh00geiguoft_djvu.txt | “the historical progress may be shown to have taken place in conformity with the scheme of the colour-spectrum … it joins the weakest tone of the colour-scale for which it has still a name, viz., blue, to this dark end”; “When Mr. Gladstone … devoted his leisure to Homeric studies, he did not fail to perceive how surprising such and similar passages were”
- MINOR | His verdict: humanity’s colour-vocabulary evolved, late and in order. | Geiger 1880 translation, lecture III pp. 60-61: https://archive.org/download/contributionstoh00geiguoft/contributionstoh00geiguoft_djvu.txt; ERIC ED019655 quoting Rivers 1901: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED019655.pdf | “The circumstance that the colour-terms originate according to a definite succession … must have a common cause … we must assume a gradually and regularly rising sensibility to impressions of colour”; Rivers: “Geiger … advanced the view that there had been a definite evolution of the colour sense in man”; F18. His verdict was that the sense itself evolved.
- CONFIRMED | Berlin & Kay … Surveying 98 languages … Basic Color Terms (1969) | https://aardvark.ucsd.edu/color/hardin2.html | “The field study on which Basic Color Terms was based used native-speaking informants in the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 languages, supplementing this limited sample with a literature search on 78 additional languages.”
- CONFIRMED | Berlin & Kay's 1969 survey found that languages acquire colour words in a near-fixed order, and a word for blue comes late | https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED019655.pdf (B&K working paper) | “At Stage V the focus of blue emerges, normally from the GREEN area”
- MINOR | Berlin & Kay's 1969 finding that the lack was in the language, not the seer / whose survey of basic colour terms relocated the lack from the retina to the lexicon | https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED019655.pdf; https://archive.org/download/coloursenseitsor00alle/coloursenseitsor00alle_djvu.txt | B&K quoting Rivers 1901: “it was generally held that these writers were not justified in their conclusions and that the close relation between language and sense which these authors supposed to exist was far from being a fact”; B&K: “we also have found no evidence relating differences in color nomenclature to differences in perceptual ability”; Allen 1879: “In every case, discrimination seems perfect, vocabulary only being at fault.”; F17. B&K concur but did not originate the relocation. A had marked this UNVERIFIABLE.
- CONFIRMED | English, all PD: Chapman (1614–15, Gutenberg 48895); Pope (1715–20, Gutenberg 6130); Cowper (1791, Gutenberg 16452 & 24269); Buckley (1851, Gutenberg 22382); Butcher & Lang (1879, Gutenberg 1728); Butler (1900, Gutenberg 1727) | Gutenberg file headers (Translator: fields) and the linked URLs (all 200): https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48895/pg48895.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-0.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24269/pg24269.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22382/pg22382.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1728/1728-0.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1727/1727-0.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3160/pg3160.txt; Gutenberg 16452 (listed at https://gutendex.com/books/?ids=1727,1728,24269,22382,6130,3160,48895,16452) | 48895 “The Odysseys of Homer … Translator: George Chapman”; 24269 “Translator: William Cowper”; 22382 “Translator: Theodore Alois Buckley”; 1727 “Translator: Samuel Butler”; 3160 “Translator: Alexander Pope”; Gutenberg 3160 (Pope's Odyssey, used in the Od. row) is missing from this list: F16.
- CONFIRMED | Each edition's translator died well over 70 years ago | https://gutendex.com/books/?ids=1727,1728,24269,22382,6130,3160,48895,16452 (B); Wikipedia (A) | Chapman d. 1634; Pope 1744; Cowper 1800; Buckley 1856; Butler 1902; Butcher “29 December 1910”; Lang “20 July 1912”
- CONFIRMED | (Quoted from the Internet Archive scan; OCR spacing normalised.) | https://archive.org/download/studiesonhomerho03glad/studiesonhomerho03glad_djvu.txt vs research/wine-dark-sea/gladstone-1858-colour.txt | “Now we must at once be struck with the poverty of the list … Out of these nine, three at least stand unrepresented.”
- CONFIRMED | Greek set in a self-hosted 5.5 KB subset of GFS Didot (SIL OFL) | recreated: ls -la public/strata/wine-dark-sea/; strings research/wine-dark-sea/GFSDidot-Regular.ttf (B) | gfs-didot-subset.woff2 5656 bytes (5.52 KiB); “This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.”
- MINOR | no third-party requests | live curl https://artwaste.land/strata/wine-dark-sea/ (line 181); memory/manifest-archive.md:14; memory/manifest.md:155 | “<script defer src="https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js" …>”; “before 2026-06-10 neither beacon nor counter ran at all”; F15. Already false when written on 2026-06-21, so WRONG at writing rather than STALE.
- MINOR | an offline verifier … which asserts each quotation is present both in its cited source file and on this page / The one Gladstone quotation is checked | research/wine-dark-sea/verify.mjs (read); recreated probe in adjudicator scratch | KEEP/DROP list 8 English fragments; GLAD_Q = “now we must at once be struck with the poverty of the list”; probe (12×→99×, three→five, 1614–1919→1614–2099, “in the bud only”→“in full bloom”) printed “22/22 checks passed”; F14.
- OBSERVED | verifier 22/22 | recreated: cd /home/user/Artificial-Wasteland && node research/wine-dark-sea/verify.mjs (A, B and the adjudicator; B also at commit 5a8a3c9767) | “22/22 checks passed”, exit 0
- OBSERVED | Measured, not assumed: with every file this layer ships emptied, it goes red. | recreated: scratch copy with public/strata/wine-dark-sea/index.html truncated to 0 bytes, then node research/wine-dark-sea/verify.mjs | “0/22 checks passed”
- CONFIRMED | It is published to read. Running it needs the repository around it. | recreated: curl -sSL -o verify.mjs https://artwaste.land/checks/research/wine-dark-sea/verify.mjs in an empty dir; node verify.mjs | 200, 7303 bytes, identical to the repo file; node exits 1 with ENOENT on …/public/strata/wine-dark-sea/index.html
- OBSERVED | Last verified 21 June 2026, when it was written. | git log 5a8a3c9767 -- public/strata/wine-dark-sea/index.html research/wine-dark-sea/verify.mjs (2026-06-21 21:27:39 +0000, the commit that adds both) | “P6 #24: The Colour of the Sea — Homer's wine-dark sea, dissected” (adds the page and verify.mjs)
- OBSERVED | The twenty-fourth entry of the Translation-Criticism Venue | git show 5a8a3c9767 (commit subject; the commit adds src/content/strata/wine-dark-sea.md and public/strata/wine-dark-sea/index.html) | “P6 #24: The Colour of the Sea — Homer's wine-dark sea, dissected”
- CONFIRMED | Every Greek and English line transcribed verbatim from a named public-domain edition | Gutenberg 1728, 24269, 1727, 3160, 22382, 6130, 48895 and Perseus grc2, all fetched: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1728/1728-0.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24269/pg24269.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1727/1727-0.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3160/pg3160.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22382/pg22382.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-0.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48895/pg48895.txt, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml | every quoted English string and Greek line found verbatim in the named edition; Verbatim holds, but three rows are not renderings of the locus they are shown under (F3, F5, F6).
- CONFIRMED | One unvowelled Hebrew root (qrn) gave Moses horns in marble (relates note) | https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+34%3A29&version=VULGATE (A); https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/bible/exodus.shtml (B) | “ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua ex consortio sermonis Domini”
- CONFIRMED | There the Iliad's first word μῆνιν … scattered across eight hands; Laozi's six characters across nine English translations (relates notes) | src/content/strata/the-first-word-is-rage.md; src/content/strata/the-way-that-can-be-told.md | “eight public-domain translators decide both”; “道可道，非常道: six characters … nine public-domain English translations (1884–1922)”
- CONFIRMED | one ambiguous word (canale) met an optical illusion … Lowell saw lines that weren't there (relates note) | WebSearch (B): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals; https://museoastronomico.brera.inaf.it/en/?p=817 | Schiaparelli's “canali” (channels) rendered “canals”; Lowell promoted artificial waterways; the canals were an optical illusion; Checked only at search-result level (B).

## Findings
- [fixed] F1 (WRONG): The page gave Gladstone's colour verdict as “in the bud only”, a phrase he uses once in vol. III about Homer's feeling for the picturesque; the dek, lede and 1858 stratum now quote his colour conclusion, “the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age”, and the md body quotes it to “partially developed”.
- [fixed] F2 (WRONG): The page said Butcher & Lang coined “wine-dark sea” in 1879, though Worsley's verse Odyssey (Blackwood, 1861) prints it at Od. 1.183; the dek now says they “give the “wine-dark sea” we all quote (Worsley's verse Odyssey had already printed it in 1861)”, the Od. caption says they “keep the colour, in the phrase we all quote”, and the a-leg-of-mutton relates note (src/content/strata/a-leg-of-mutton.md:16) no longer says “coined”, though the Nearby block rendered from it on this page still does until the nearby backfill runs.
- [fixed] F3 (WRONG): The Cowper row at Od. 1.183 quoted his Book II prayer (Od. 2.262-264, which renders ἠεροειδέα πόντον); the row now gives his Od. 1.183, “Seeking a people of another tongue / Athwart the gloomy flood, in quest of brass”, and the caption says he keeps a colour “but the wrong one (gloomy, not wine)”.
- [fixed] F4 (WRONG): The Cowper paragraph called “the gray Deep” and “the sable Deep” two adjacent lines rendering Homer's grey and wine seas; it now says that within one short prayer scene (Od. 2.261–263) he renders the grey sea (πολιῆς ἁλὸς) as “the gray Deep” and, a few lines on, the misty sea (ἠεροειδέα πόντον) as “the sable Deep”, the phrase he elsewhere gives οἶνοψ (Od. 2.421, 5.132).
- [fixed] F5 (WRONG): The Pope Odyssey row at Od. 1.183 quoted a couplet from Athena's leave-taking at Od. 1.315-318; it now quotes his rendering of the locus, “Freighted with iron from my native land, / I steer my voyage to the Brutian strand”, still marked as dropping the epithet, and the caption says “into a place-name”.
- [fixed] F6 (WRONG): The Chapman row under Il. 2.613 showed “the wine-hued seas” and “the sable seas”, both from his Odyssey; the row now quotes Chapman's Iliads (c. 1611, ed. Hooper 1888, Internet Archive) “To pass the gulfy purple sea”, coloured purple, and its note and the caption put the wine-hued and sable split at Od. 3.286 and 6.170.
- [fixed] F7 (WRONG): The wine swatch said “12× in all”, which is the Odyssey's count alone; it now reads “17× of the sea (5 Il., 12 Od.)”.
- [fixed] F8 (WRONG): Geiger's stratum was dated 1877 and his work “(1870s)”, though he died in 1870; the stratum is now 1867 and cites his lecture “read at Frankfurt, 24 September 1867 (collected posthumously 1871; English tr. D. Asher, Trübner 1880)”, and the md body says “Geiger (1867)”.
- [fixed] F9 (MINOR): The header span “6 hands · 1614–1919” ran to a year no translation on the page has; it now reads “6 hands · 1611–1900”, taking in Chapman's Iliads (c. 1611) and ending at Butler.
- [fixed] F10 (MINOR): The lede and dek said three translators refused to decide where the instrument shows two; the lede now says “two of them (Pope and Butler)” and the dek “two (Pope and Butler)”.
- [fixed] F11 (MINOR): The meta, og and JSON-LD descriptions and the dek said the word crosses into English “a dozen” ways; they now say “half a dozen ways”, as does the relates note in src/content/strata/the-last-colour.md:11.
- [fixed] F12 (MINOR): The page called Gladstone's nine “the nine of the prism”; the block-quotation's citation and the 1858 stratum now say nine colours, “the seven of the prism, plus white and black”.
- [fixed] F13 (MINOR): Geiger's stratum listed “the Norse sagas”, which he does not cite; it now reads “across the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta, the Bible and (in a note) the Koran and the Edda”.
- [fixed] F14 (MINOR): The apparatus said the verifier asserts each quotation in its source file and on the page, which it did not; it now says the verifier checks a key phrase of each English rendering, six Greek phrases, both halves of the Gladstone block-quotation and his conclusion on colour, recounts the seventeen sea uses of οἶνοψ, and does not check that an excerpt comes from its locus nor any other figure or date, and the md body says the same with “37/37”. The verifier now reads each excerpt from after its header line, so a phrase quoted only in an excerpt's header cannot pass (probed on a scratch copy: with the Worsley phrase removed from the excerpt body and left in its header, the run fails 36/37).
- [fixed] F15 (MINOR): “no third-party requests” was false when written, since the site's worker had injected Cloudflare's analytics beacon into every page since 2026-06-10; the apparatus and md body now say only that “the font makes no third-party request”.
- [fixed] F16 (MINOR): The apparatus listed only Pope's Iliad although the Od. row quotes his Odyssey, whose Book I is Fenton's; the apparatus now lists “Odyssey 1725–26, Gutenberg 3160, Book I by his assistant Elijah Fenton, counted here as Pope's hand”, and the row is credited “Pope (Book I by Fenton)”.
- [fixed] F17 (MINOR): The dek and md body credited Berlin & Kay with moving the lack from the eye to the word, a view their own paper says was already “generally held” by 1901; the dek now gives their finding as a near-fixed order of basic colour words, “blue late: a pattern in the words, not the eye”, and the body says the eye “had already been largely cleared by late-19th-century field reports, as they themselves note”.
- [fixed] F18 (MINOR): Geiger's verdict was given as an evolving vocabulary, when he put the order down to an evolving colour-sense; the stratum now says colour-words arise in the same order everywhere, “which he put down to a colour-sense that itself evolved, late and in the order of the spectrum”.
- [fixed] F19 (MINOR): The swatch caption said Homer paints the sea “four ways” and that Gladstone “counted exactly this”, but Homer also calls the sea purple and Gladstone counted colour-words generally; it now says “in four of these colours (he also has purple, πορφύρεος)” and that Gladstone “counted his colour-words and read the gap as a defect of the eye”.
- [fixed] F20 (MINOR): The blue cell showed γλαυκή θάλασσα as the phrase Homer never writes, though he writes it once (Il. 16.34); the band now reads “(never blue)”.
- [fixed] F21 (MINOR): The dark swatch called μέλας Homer's “commonest reach”, “passim”, where of the sea he far more often says grey or wine; the locus now reads “e.g. Il. 24.79 μείλανι πόντῳ, Od. 12.104 μέλαν ὕδωρ” and the gloss says μέλας is his commonest colour-word overall, “though for the sea itself he far more often says grey”.
- [fixed] F22 (MINOR): The Od. note said Athena came to the men of Temesa, when in the Greek she has put in at Ithaca on her way there; it now says she “has put in here “sailing over the wine-faced sea” to men of strange speech, bound for Temesa”.