“Wine-dark sea is a traditional English translation of oînops póntos (οἶνοψ πόντος), from oînos (οἶνος, “wine”) + óps (ὄψ, “eye; face”), a Homeric epithet.”*

*Wikipedia

From The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), by Patricia Highsmith:

“The very chanciness of trying for all of Dickie’s money, the peril of it, was irresistible to him. He was so bored after the dreary, eventless weeks in Venice, when each day that went by had seemed to confirm his personal safety and to emphasize the dullness of his existence. Roverini had stopped writing to him. Alvin McCarron had gone back to America (after nothing more than another inconsequential telephone call to him from Rome), and Tom supposed that he and Mr Greenleaf had concluded that Dickie was either dead or hiding of his own will, and that further search was useless. The newspapers had stopped printing anything about Dickie for want of anything to print. Tom had a feeling of emptiness and abeyance that had driven him nearly mad until he made the trip to Munich in his car. When he came back to Venice to pack for Greece and to close his house, the sensation had been worse: he was about to go to Greece, to those ancient heroic islands, as little Tom Ripley, shy and meek, with a dwindling two-thousand-odd in his bank, so that he would practically have to think twice before he bought himself even a book on Greek art. It was intolerable.
He had decided in Venice to make his voyage to Greece an heroic one. He would see the islands, swimming for the first time into his view, as a living, breathing, courageous individual – not as a cringing little nobody from Boston. If he sailed right into the arms of the police in Piraeus, he would at least have known the days just before, standing in the wind at the prow of a ship, crossing the wine-dark sea like Jason or Ulysses returning…

…He tried to turn his thoughts to Greece. For him, Greece was gilded, with the gold of warriors’ armour and with its own famous sunlight. He saw stone statues with calm, strong faces, like the women on the porch of the Erechtheum. He didn’t want to go to Greece with the threat of the fingerprints in Venice hanging over him. It would debase him. He would feel as low as the lowest rat that scurried in the gutters of Athens, lower than the dirtiest beggar who would accost him in the streets of Salonika. Tom put his face in his hands and wept. Greece was finished, exploded like a golden balloon.”