WERE THE HOMERIC GREEKS COLOR-BLIND?

WERE THE HOMERIC GREEKS COLOR-BLIND? I posted here on the issue of whether speakers of a language with more words for a color are better at distinguishing those colors. (For example, Professor Boroditsky in her article says that Russian-speakers are better at distinguishing shades of blue because Russian has an extra distinction between light blue and dark blue.) A review by Clive Cookson of Guy Deutscher’s THROUGH THE LANGUAGE GLASS in the Financial Times a few weeks ago (June19/20) had a story about language and color that had an interesting twist. In 1858, William Gladstone, who was to have long service as British Prime Minister, advanced a theory about the Homeric Greeks. (Back then, a Prime Minister could be a classical scholar.) Gladstone published what Cookson describes as “an exhaustive study [which] showed the black-white-nature of the Homeric world; blues and greens are never mentioned, and Homer’s few colour descriptions often seem off-key.” Linguists usually frame this kind of debate in terms of the effect of language on the perception of color. Gladstone reversed the argument. He claimed that the Greeks were unable to see color the way modern people could because their eyes had not evolved to perceive color. This 1878 article from the 1878 London Times (Ah, the wonders of the internet) quotes Gladstone as arguing that …”the organ of color was but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.” Cookson says: “In keeping with the new enthusiasm for Darwinian thinking, scientists proposed that full colour vision had evolved over the past 2,000 years or so in response to all the new colours of modern civilisation.”