gems, color science, color theory, art, anthropology, Rome, ancient color terms, Greece, Greek poetry

Deciphering colour terms from early Greek poetry (that is, from poetry prior to the fifth century) is one of Classical philology’s longest-standing conundrums. What should a modern reader make of Homer’s “wine-dark” (οἶνοψ) cattle or his “violet” (ἰοειδής) sea? How is it that only a select few of the hues from Newton’s seven-colour ROYGBIV spectrum are represented in early Greek poetry? Through its ongoing assessment and comparison of languages from all over the world representing a wide variety of cultures, cultural linguistics offers a means of addressing these difficult questions. In its earlier stages, however, scholars in this sub-field of anthropology turned to the work of Classical philologists on Greek colour terms, using Homeric Greek in particular as one of their comparanda. This chapter does not attempt to answer the thorny questions posed above, which are likely to inspire a great deal of scholarship for years to come, but rather will trace the beginnings of colour term study by both philologists and anthropologists. If it is true that, as Turner claims, “anthropology presents perhaps the most tangled case of philological influence on a humanistic discipline,” then the history of the study of colour terms provides a clear narrative of how the roots of these disciplines grew entangled with each other. I relate this story beginning with nineteenth-century work on Homer which linked colour terminology to the ancient Greeks’ visual capabilities and situating it in the context of the scientific work of Sir Isaac Newton on colour, John Dalton on colour-blindness, and Charles Darwin on evolution. I then take up the origins of cultural linguistics, tracing how this process parallels the development of anthropology itself, before moving on to the work of early twentieth-century philologists on colour. In the final section of this chapter, I return to mid-century cultural linguistics, specifically Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s inclusion of Homeric Greek in their seminal Basic Color Terms in 1969. I address why this dialect of ancient Greek has had such influence in the history of the study of colour terms and how varying trends in cultural linguistics have affected its use by both anthropologists and classicists. Much like classical studies, the study of colour terms is fundamentally interdisciplinary, currently requiring the participation of, according to Dedrick and Paramei, “psychophysicists and physiologists, cognitive psychologists and linguists, ethnographers and ethnoscientists, computer scientists and philosophers and neuropsychologists and ophthalmologists and literary scholars (who must) take each other seriously, on pain of mistake or irrelevance.” This chapter maps out where the work of classicists and anthropologists on colour terms has intersected and diverged to examine the enduring influence of Homeric Greek on this field of study.