The meaning of χλωρὸν δεός is probably ashy-pale fear. In the green of the olive we see the point of connection between this use of the term on the one hand, and natural verdure on the other. So that the image of the colour green, to the Greeks, was neither lively and bright on the one hand, nor was it strong and deep on the other.
The second circumstance is this: that the word χλωρὸς is applied by the later Greeks to objects that have a colour, but a colour which is not green: and this by authors who had the full use of sight. Thus, in Euripides, (Hecuba 124,) we have αἵματι χλωρῷ for blood freshly shed. It seems plain that, when the epithet could be thus used, colour could only be very carelessly and faintly conceived in the minds either of those who used the expression, or of those to whom it was addressed.
I shall not open the general subject of the treatment of colour by the later Greeks, or by the Latin poets. But that it continued to be both faint and indefinite down to a very late period, and in a degree which would now be deemed very surprising, we may judge both from the general tenour of the Æneid, and from the remarkable verse of Albinovanus, an Augustan poet, which applied the epithet ‘purpureus’ to snow;
Brachia purpureâ candidiora nive.
Neither do I enter into the question, whether the shadows of white may afford any ground for this epithet: because an answer, drawn from the secrets as it were of science or art, could not avail for the interpretation of the works of a poet, who must describe for the common eye.
So we may note the ‘cervix rosea’ of Horace[858], and of Virgil[859].
Greek philosophy of colour.
Such examination as I have been able to make would lead me to suppose whatever of this kind was crude or defective in the common ideas of Greece was not without points of correspondence in its philosophy.
The treatise Περὶ χρωμάτων, popularly ascribed to Aristotle, would appear to belong to some other author. It, however, in conformity with Greek ideas[860], bases the system of colour not, as we do, upon the prismatic decomposition of light, but upon the four elements; of which it declares air, water, and even earth when dry, to be white, fire to be ξανθὸς or yellow; from the mixtures of these arise all other colours, and σκότος, or black, is the absence of light.
Dr. Prantl, a recent editor of this Treatise, has, in a learned Essay of his own, gathered together the systems of the various Greek writers upon colour; and especially that of Aristotle, from the testimony afforded by his Meteorologica and other works. It exhibits a curious combination of the aim at scientific exactness, with the want of the physical knowledge which is, in such matters, its necessary basis. Its leading ideas appear to be as follows.