We have other proofs from the poems that Homer conceived of μέλας as dark, and not specifically as black. The former idea accords best with his calling earth μέλας, when it is fresh behind the plough (Il. xviii. 548): and his calling blood μέλας, not stagnant gore, but blood fresh as it comes spurting from the wound (Il. i. 303),
αἶψά τοι αἷμα κελαινὸν ἐρωήσει περὶ δουρί·
and again, the fresh blood of Venus herself: μελαίνετο δὲ χρόα καλόν (Il. v. 354). It would be bad poetry to call the blood of Venus black, for the same reasons which make it good poetry in Shakespeare to call the blood of Duncan golden. So the μέλας πόντος of Il. xxiv. 79 is evidently no more than dark; though in vii. 64 we may properly say the sea blackens.
So again with wine-coloured oxen, smutty thunder-bolts, violet-coloured sheep, and many more, it is surely conclusive against taking them for descriptions of prismatic colours or their compounds, that they would be bad descriptions in their several kinds.
Homer’s means of training in colour.
We must then seek for the basis of Homer’s system with respect to colour in something outside our own. And it may prepare us the more readily to acknowledge such a basis elsewhere, if we bear in mind, that many of the great elements and sources of colour for us presented themselves differently to him. The olive hue of the skin kept down the play of white and red. The hair tended much more uniformly, than with us, to darkness. The sense of colour was less exercised by the culture of flowers. The sun sooner changed the spring-greens of the earth into brown. Glass, one of our instruments of instruction, did not exist. The rainbow would much more rarely meet the view. The art of painting was wholly, and that of dyeing was almost, unknown; and we may estimate the importance of this element of the case by recollecting how much, with the advance of chemistry, the taste of this country in colour has improved within the last twenty years. The artificial colours, with which the human eye was conversant, were chiefly the ill-defined, and anything but full-bodied, tints of metals. The materials, therefore, for a system of colour did not offer themselves to Homer’s vision as they do to ours. Particular colours were indeed exhibited in rare beauty, as the blue of the sea and of the sky. Yet these colours were, so to speak, isolated fragments; and, not entering into a general scheme, they were apparently not conceived with the precision necessary to master them. It seems easy to comprehend that the eye may require a familiarity with an ordered system of colours, as the condition of its being able closely to appreciate any one among them.
I conclude, then, that the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.
In lieu of this, Homer seems to have had, firstly some crude conceptions of colour derived from the elements; secondly and principally, a system in lieu of colour, founded upon light and upon darkness, its opposite or negative. We have seen that the μέλας of Homer, which is applied to fine olive tints in the skin, and which joins hands with κυάνεος and πορφύρεος, means dark, the absence of light. On the other hand, the basis of whiteness is clearly indicated to us in the etymology of λευκὸς, which is the same as that of λεύσσω to see, and of λύκη light in λυκαβὰς the year, the walk or course of light; as well as in the cognate words, which appear to have their root in the Sanscrit loch, from whence lochan, an eye[854].
His system one of light and dark.
As a general proposition, then, I should say that the Homeric colours are really the modes and forms of light[855], and of its opposite or rather negative, darkness: partially affected perhaps by ideas drawn from the metals, like the ruddiness of copper, or the sombre and dead blue of κύανος, whatever the substance may have been; and here and there with an inceptive effort, as it were, to get hold of other ideas of colour.