Of course, few questions are more moot, vexed, and thorny than whether or not the Greeks really saw blue, had a word for blue, or even knew what blue was. Famously, Homer often refers to the sea as oinops pontos, “the wine-looking sea,” usually translated as “wine dark.” William Gladstone, finding time while serving as Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote a book on Homer which included the first serious study of Greeks and color. It has recently reemerged as an interesting element in the renewed Sapir-Whorf debate in academic linguistics. If you are interested, I recommend Guy Deutscher’s
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