Fathoming the wine-dark sea

Gladstone found something very strange indeed in Homer, but the world was treating the future prime minister warily when he published his findings. It was 1858, the year he sailed off to the Ionian Islands as ruling commissioner, to address his puzzled Italian-speaking subjects in classical Greek. But even if Gladstone really was mad, as his political opponents said, he was undeniably right in noting that Homer’s use of colour was deeply odd.

It wasn’t just the ‘wine-dark sea’. That epithet oinops, ‘wine-looking’ (the version ‘wine-dark’ came from Andrew Lang’s later translation) was applied both to the sea and to oxen, and it was accompanied by other colours just as nonsensical. ‘Violet’, ioeis, (from the flower) was used by Homer of the sea too, but also of wool and iron. Chloros, ‘green’, was used of honey, faces and wood. By far the most common colour words in his reticent vocabulary were black (170 times) and white (100), followed distantly by red (13).

What could account for this alien colour-sense? It wasn’t that Homer (if Homer existed) was blind, for there are parallel usages in other Greek authors. Glad- stone’s radical conclusion was that ‘the organs of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age’. He was writing at a time when evolution was in the air, but had not yet been explained by natural selection, let alone genetics.

In 1867, Lazarus Geiger noted that in the ancient Vedic hymns there was (as in Homer) no blue sky, nor was there in the Hebrew of the Bible. A decade later Hugo Magnus suggested that the eyesight of ancient people resembled that of modern man in twilight, with limited colour distinction. Rapid physical development of colour vision was being proposed.

At the beginning of the 20th century it was the turn of anthropology to provide hypotheses, when W.