Under the application of this principle, I believe that all, or nearly all, the Homeric words will fall into their places: and that we shall find that the Poet used them, from his own standing-ground, with great vigour and effect. We can now see why λευκὸς and μέλας with their kindred words have such an immense predominance: though white and black are the limiting ratios of colour, rather than colour itself.
Of the transparent and opaque, or chiaroscuro, we cannot expect to hear from Homer: yet, as has been observed, a rudiment of it may be contained in the highly poetical ἠεροειδὲς of the cave or sea; and again in the δνοφερὴ νὺξ (Od. xiii. 269), since νέφος is the basis of the epithet.
When we speak of colour proper, we speak of an effect which is produced by the decomposition of light, and which, so long as the eye can discharge its function, is complete, whatever the quantity, or the incidence, of light upon the object said to have colour may happen to be.
When we speak of light, shade, and darkness, we refer to the quantity of light, not decomposed, which falls upon that object, and to the mode of its incidence.
Of light, shadow, and darkness thus regarded, Homer had lively and most poetical conceptions. This description of objects by light and its absence tax his materials to the uttermost. His iron-grey, his ruddy, his starry heaven, are so many modes of light. His wine-coloured oxen and sea, his violet sheep, his things tawny, purple, sooty, and the rest, give us in fact a rich vocabulary of words for describing what is dark so far as it has colour, but what also varies between dull and bright, according to the quantity of light playing upon it. Here (for example) is the link between his αἴθοψ κάπνος and his αἴθοψ οἶνος.
As these words all follow in the train, so to speak, of μέλας, even so λευκὸς is attended by its own family, all falling under the meaning of the English adjective light. On the one hand χλωρὸς and πόλιος; on the other μαρμάρεος, ἀργὸς, and σιγαλόεις, all mean light; but the first two are dull, and represent the twilight of colour, or debateable ground between it and its negative, while the last three are bright and glistering.
Nothing can be more poetical than Homer’s ideas of dark and light. It was a redundancy of life in these ideas, that made him associate light with motion; as in those fine lines (Il. ii. 437),
ὣς τῶν ἐρχομένων ἀπὸ χαλκοῦ θεσπεσίοιο
αἴγλη παμφανόωσα δι’ αἰθέρος οὐρανὸν ἷκεν.