1. Homer’s similes are so rich in the use of all sensible imagery, that we might have expected to find colour a frequent and prominent ingredient in them. But it is not so. They turn chiefly, I think, upon the following ideas:
1. Motion.
2. Force.
3. Form.
4. Sound.
5. Symmetry.
6. Number.
7. Light and Darkness.
8. Very rarely, upon Colour.
In the greater part of them colour is not even mentioned. I have seen the similes of the poems reckoned at two hundred: and I have found it difficult to note more than three which turn upon colour, even when it is vaguely conceived.
The first is the blood of Menelaus, compared to a crimson dye, on the cheek-piece of a horse, Il. iv. 141.
The second, the meditations of Nestor, likened to the darkening of the sea before a storm, Il. xiv. 16-22.
Thirdly, the cloud in which Minerva is wrapped is compared to the rainbow, Il. xvii. 547-52.
Of these the second is very indefinite: the idea of the first, as we have seen, was inaccurately and loosely conceived: and the third is one of the most striking proofs of the want of a close discrimination of colours in Homer.
Yet here again we may find life and beauty in the passage, if only we construe it of a cloud illuminated by the rays falling on it. Indeed, generally the element of light brings us back to Homer’s usual definiteness, when his use of colour makes him obscure.
2. Again, in the numerous and very exact epithets by which the Poet has described the form and appearance of different countries, we scarcely find any epithet of colour. Out of about sixty of these epithets in the Greek Catalogue, there are but three that refer to colour, and these all mention whiteness only (ἀργινόεις, Il. ii. 647, 656, and λευκός, ibid. 735).
In the case of the horse.