_Homer’s Perceptions and Use of Colour._
The subject of the Homeric numbers has been discussed at considerable
length, on account of its connection with important questions of
history. That of colours may, even on its own merits, deserve a
careful examination. This inquiry will resemble, however, the former
discussion in the appearance of paradox, which the argument may seem
to present. Next to the idea of number, there is none perhaps more
definite to the modern mind generally, as well as in particular to
the English mind, than that of colour. That our own country has some
special aptitude in this respect, we may judge from the comparatively
advantageous position, which the British painters have always held
as colourists among other contemporary schools. Nothing seems more
readily understood and retained by very young children among us, than
the distinctions between the principal colours. In regard to one point,
the case of numbers is here reversed. There the idea becomes indefinite
as we ascend in the scale, here it is as we descend. Colour becomes
doubtful as it becomes faint, more and more clear as it is accumulated
and heightened. But the facility with which we discriminate colour in
all its marked forms, is probably the result of traditional aptitude,
since we seem to find, as we go far backward in human history, that the
faculty is less and less mature.
I am conscious that the subject, which is now before us, in reality
deserves a scientific investigation, which I am not capable of
affording to it: and also that we are, as yet, far from being able
to render the language of the ancients for colour into our own with
the confidence, which we can feel in almost every other department of
interpretation. My endeavours will be limited, firstly, to a collection
of ‘_realien_,’ or facts of the poems, in the case of Colour: and,
secondly, to pointing out what appears to be the basis of the ideas and
perceptions of Homer respecting it, and the relation of that basis to
the ideas of the later Greeks.
Among the signs of the immaturity which I have mentioned, the following
are found in the poems of Homer: