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No, the Ancient Greeks Weren’t Color Blind. They Justed Had Unique Ways to Describe the World
Were ancients color-blind? They weren’t but this idea has been passed around for centuries, usually by classicists confused by the Greeks’ odd choice of descriptive language. Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the first ‘great’ poet of western civilization described the sea as oînops, or ‘wine-dark’.
Today’s guest is David Wharton, editor and contributor to “A Cultural History of Color in Antiquity,” is here to disabuse those ideas of the ancient world. Some prominent, recent research on Latin color language asserts that the ancient Romans mostly lacked abstract color concepts…
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