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Greek Colour-Perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Maurice Platnauer
Maurice Platnauer
Affiliation:
Winchester College
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Extract

No one who has read the classics with any attention can fail to have been struck by certain oddities in both the Greek and Latin usage of epithets denoting colour. How really strange their application often is may have escaped general notice for three reasons: partly, it may be, because custom has staled their surprising character—phrases such as ‘the wine-dark sea’ having become, so to say, ‘household words’; partly because a natural and on the whole commendable diffidence prevents our attributing, at least to the Greeks, anything that seems in the least derogatory from an artistic point of view; and partly because these instances of curious usage are scattered and so have no cumulative effect on our judgement.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 3-4 , July 1921 , pp. 153 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1921

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References

page 153 note 1 Citations refer only to typical, not to all, instances.

page 153 note 2 Gladstone, , ‘Colour in the Homeric Age’ (Homer and the Homeric Age, vol. 3), p. 476Google Scholar.

page 155 note 1 See Boisacq, Dict. etymol. under ⋯ρϒής and ⋯ρϒ⋯ς.

page 155 note 2 Gladstone, , op. cit., p. 470Google Scholar.

page 157 note 2 Gladstone, (Juv. Mund., p. 540)Google Scholar pointed out that in Homer there was only one reference to the rainbow, and then (Λ 27) it was rather to its ‘stripiness’ than to its colour. Iris, too, has no colour epithet; she is only ‘golden-winged’ (θ 398).

page 159 note 1 Boisacq doubts the connexion of πορϕύρα (for which he suggests a Semitic origin) and πορϕύρω.

page 161 note 1 Simonides uses it once of water (frag. 23).

page 162 note 1 See Jebb's appendix (p 473) in his edition of Bacchylides. He concludes that the word = fresh and young.