#homeric epithets

A second line of thought about Greek colour words/perception comes to us from Berlin & Kay, two scholars who tried to give a structural layout of how languages develop colour terms. According to their research, primitive colour vocabulary has only a light/dark distinction, which develops into white/black + red; which develops further to white/black/red + green or yellow; and then finally we can add blue to the mix. When more than the basic categories are in use, you can start adding categories in more or less any order (brown can get distinguished from red at this stage, orange and pink as well, etc. but the idea is you won’t have a language that has a “pink” word before it has a “green” word).

From what I remember of my linguistics classes, there are lots of exceptions to the above pattern, but it accurately describes most if not all European languages. Which counts as "universal" in most classrooms because hey, we can either accurately describe the mechanics of language, or we can narrowly define those mechanics in such a way as to use them as a cudgel; we can't do both.

As far as it goes, it's not a terrible theory, but I'd also like to add that on the cultural dimension, the Ancient Greeks in the archaic period simply did not give a shit about the colour blue. It didn't have a large cultural role, didn't feature in textile dyes (until trade really opened up with India -- indigo is mentioned, I believe, in Herodotus, but only in passing, for instance), and there were few things people needed to interact with that were blue. So the fact of not having a specific and stable colour word for the sea/sky range of colours is less a matter of ocular or terminological deficiency, and more, in my opinion, a matter of an efficient evolution of language as a technology. The "blue" category wouldn't help you do anything, wouldn't pick out distinct and meaningful features of your lifeworld, so why would you need it?

A more general point about the Ancient Greek relation to colours was made in the 1930s by A. E. Kober, who wrote that they lacked an:

appreciation of the beauty of colour, as distinguished from the material which is coloured, or from variations in light intensity, and seem, as a whole, almost entirely incapable of understanding that differences in the shades of a given colour exist.

And why would they? They didn't have the range of artificial colours that we have, so they had less need of the words to differentiate them. I kind of think this is why the question only starts to get asked in the 19tch century, with the rise of industrial textiles and synthetic dyes. Otherwise, why weren't medieval Latin scholars probing into the colour-sense of Ancient Greece?

Complicating this narrative, Homer and other Greeks did indeed have words for blue, they were just polyvalent, unstable, and "chromatically imprecise" (a term borrowed from Michel Pastoureau's history of the colour blue). Pierre Chantraine's etymological dictionary of the Greek language talks about how Γλαῦκος [glaûkos] never really settled on a single uniform meaning in the Homeric era, denoting either pale blue or simply "light" colours: «[…] le terme exprime à la fois la lumière et une couleur bleu pâle.» Still, we find the word used by Homer to describe the sea: "γλαυκὴ δέ σε τίκτε θάλασσα πέτραι τ᾽ ἠλίβατοι[…]" and indeed the term can denote light, or pale blue, or blue-green, or shimmering depending on the context.

The terms were just used messily and broadly because there was no reason not to. Stable colour terms for blue seem, from my reading, to develop alongside cultures that produced blue dyes, used blues, and had need of the terminology (again, language as technology). Germanic peoples used woad to make blue dyes (this is how the Picts coloured themselves), and blau or its relatives replaced Latinate terms for blue in many Romance languages. The Romance languages that don't use the Germanic root use words related to azure, derived from a Persian root related to lapis lazuli, which was used to make blue pigments.

So my contention here is that if it's true that the Greeks had a peculiarly unstable set of categories for blueishness, it's because there was no material need for them to develop a stable colour category. But that's been a long digression.

A sillier line of thought came around in the '80s, and that was that Greek wine, back in the day, was actually blue. At least when mixed with the very alkaline water they'd have mixed in. We can discount this theory because Homer describes wine as red, purple, and (in a somewhat perplexing pleonasm) as "wine-dark." So we can assume the wine in question was red.

There's even a meteorological theory [same article as the blue wine link] about the dust content in the air giving the sea a reddish hue at sunset/sunrise. But unless Achilles opted to exclusively curse the sea when there was natural bisexual lighting available, I think we can rule that out.

Finally, a theory proposed by P.G. Maxwell-Stuart in 1981 is that Homer was using the phrase not to denote something about the colour of the sea, but to evoke something about the character and nature of the sea.

Because Homer, get this, was a poet (or a series of poets partaking in what we call the Homeric tradition), and poets use language weird.

I'll quote Maxwell-Stuart at length, because I think he makes a good point well. After providing a startling number of examples of the phrase as used in verse and prose (the latter of which he takes as giving a better idea of the normal acceptation of the term), he concludes:

One is left, therefore, to suggest that the image arises purely from the poet's imagination. But imagination does not work in a vacuum: something must trigger the connection between one object and its description. For example, I can use the phrase 'green fingered' and be understood without difficulty. I am referring to someone's abilities as a gardener, but I am still using a colour term because there is some association, however remote, between his fingers and the green plants he is trying to grow.

In the same way, there must have been some reason for Homer's choosing to use οἶνοψ [oinops, i.e. wine-dark] and πορφύρεος in contexts involving the sea, and I am going to presume that he was too accomplished an artist simply to be governed by the exigencies of metre. Surely Nonnos, who was so steeped in Homeric language, has indicated, several times, the way to understand Homer's train of thought. The οἶνοψ sea is wine-eyed, drunk, rolling about, possibly violent, dangerous, 'bloody' in the sense of lethal. On several occasions, the adjective is applied to a sea made choppy by strong winds; Odysseus uses it when he describes how he escaped from a storm at sea; and on two other occasions, the οἴνοπα πόντον spells danger by drowning after such a storm. The translation 'wine-dark' conveys none of this, because it attempts to render only the most simple colour association, and this is one reason for one's being ware of using poetry alone to define colour terms, or of trying to interpret poetry without first having ascertained the full range of the word's possible meaning.

I think this view — that Homer was leaning on a connotative and evocative sense of "wine-eyed" — is probably true regardless of whether or not we can glean anything about Ancient Greek colour perception from the usage.