Was Sirius once red?

Back in 2020, when I wrote a piece about ancient Greek colour terms, two comments raised an interesting side-question: what colour was the star Sirius in antiquity?

Did Sirius look red to ancient astronomers? First, be warned that the colours above aren’t real. Colours in space photos are always heavily enhanced — or, as in this picture, totally fake.

Sirius is the brightest star in our night sky. In antiquity it was also known as the Dog star; it still is today. It looks white. Or maybe blue-white: its spectrum has its peak at blue frequencies, and photographs tend to create blue halos. But really Sirius floods the entire range of visible light.

Over the last 250 years a question has been simmering, because — supposedly — some ancient writers describe it as ‘red’. Astronomers want to know: is it even possible that Sirius changed colour between the 100s and the 1700s CE?

The modern debate

But, to this rule there seems to be one exception, and that in a remarkable star: for old authors mention the Dog star, which is now white, and not at all inclined to redness, as being then very much so; as in the following places: ...

Barker 1759: 499

The colour change theory was first proposed in 1759 by Thomas Barker, an English country squire, meteorologist, and astronomer. He cited several pieces of ancient testimony, looking directly at the Greek and Latin terminology in each case:

• Aratos, Phainomena 326–328 (3rd cent. BCE): the Dog star is ποικίλος (poikílos).
• Cicero, Aratea fr. 34.107–108 ed. Pellacani (1st cent. BCE): the Dog star ‘shines with rutilus light’ (rutilo cum lumine claret).
• Horace, Satires 2.5.39-40 (1st cent. BCE): refers to rubra Canicula.
• Seneca, Quaestiones naturales 1.1.7 (1st cent. CE): refers to the rubor of Canicula.
• Ptolemy, Almagest 7.5, 142 ed. Heiberg (2nd cent. CE): ‘the star in the mouth [of the Dog constellation, i.e. Canis Major] is the brightest, called the Dog; it is ὑπόκιρρος (hypókirrhos)’.
• Hyginus, Astronomica 2.35 (1st cent. BCE/CE): refers to the ‘brightness’ or ‘whiteness of its flame’ (flammae candorem); Barker thinks (1) candor means strictly ‘whiteness’; so (2) this reference ‘expressly contradicts’ the others; so (3) Hyginus should be disregarded.

You’ll notice I’m leaving some Greek and Latin terms untranslated. That’s because their meaning is precisely what we’ll explore below.

I won’t cover the full history of the debate, which was argued by astronomers such as Jérôme de Lalande, Theodor von Schubert, and John Herschel. For the full story, see Ceragioli (1995).

One key development was in 1850, when Alexander von Humboldt published volume 3 of his book series Kosmos. Humboldt delved into the philology of the terms used by the ancient writers, with special attention to Ptolemy’s colour term, hypókirrhos.

The expression ὑπόκιῤῥος, which Ptolemy employs indiscriminately to designate the six stars named in his catalogue [i.e. the six stars named as hypókirrhos], implies a slightly marked transition from fiery-yellow [feuergelb] to fiery-red [feuerroth]; it therefore refers, strictly speaking, to a fiery-reddish colour. ... Κιῤῥός is, according to Galen, (Meth. med. 12,) a pale fiery-red inclining to yellow. ... Sirius is said by Seneca (Nat. Quæst., i. 1) to be redder than Mars ...

Humboldt 1851: 176 n. 46 (tr. Otté) = 1850: 204 n. 46

This report of the terminology is still widely treated as authoritative, because astronomers don’t typically learn Latin and ancient Greek these days. But as we’ll see, Humboldt is entirely wrong.

Roger C. Ceragioli, who trained as a classicist, wrote a 1995 article covering the modern debate and exposing the deluge of misinformation. Ceragioli handily disposes of most of the supposed evidence for ‘red Sirius’, but he thinks Barker’s references to Ptolemy, Horace, and Seneca stand up.

There is no doubt about what Ptolemy means. He bluntly says ‘reddish’ and other ancient sources corroborate him ...

Ceragioli 1995: 187

As a result, they still need explanation: either it’s because Sirius scintillates in various colour-flashes when close to the horizon (Ceragioli 1995), or because hypókirrhos in Ptolemy is an interpolation (Ceragioli 1996).

Note. The only other substantive discussion of the matter by a modern classicist that I’ve found is by Pellacani (2015: 156–157), who is much more willing to indulge the ‘red Sirius’ theory, is unaware of Ceragioli’s articles, and is selective in his reading of another key source, Avienius. We’ll return to Avienius below.

In fact none of the supposed evidence for ‘red’ Sirius stands up to scrutiny:

• Hypókirrhos doesn’t mean ‘fiery red’ or ‘reddish’: it means ‘pale yellow’.
• Horace’s and Seneca’s rubor primarily denotes ‘heat’. Its meaning as a colour term, ‘red’, is uncommon.
• Cicero’s word rutilus primarily means ‘bright, shiny’, especially when used of celestial bodies. And anyway, when he uses the word he’s not talking about Sirius.

In fiction, Sirius is usually shown as noticeably blue to the naked eye. (Elite Dangerous, 2014)

Ptolemy: hypókirrhos

For modern advocates of ‘red Sirius’, Ptolemy’s testimony carries the most weight.

Κυνὸς ἀστερισμός.
ὁ ἐν τῷ στόματι λαμπρότατος καλούμενος Κύων καὶ ὑπόκιρρος ...
Constellation of Canis (Major).
The (star) in the mouth (of the Great Dog); the brightest; called the Dog; and hypókirrhos...

Ptolemy, Almagest 7.5, 142 ed. Heiberg

Hypókirrhos is ‘somewhat kirrhós’. But neither hypókirrhos nor kirrhós means ‘red’. A more correct translation is ‘cream, light yellow’.

Hypókirrhos and kirrhós are very rare words in most contexts. In extant classical-era texts (5th–4th century BCE) they appear only twice, both in the Hippokratic corpus. The etymology is unknown. Even at the best of times, interpreting Greek colour terms is tricky: here, extreme caution is needed.

The argument for interpreting hypókirrhos as ‘reddish’ rests entirely on these two points:

1. Ptolemy describes six stars as hypókirrhos: Arcturus, Aldebaran, Pollux, Antares, Betelgeuse, and Sirius (Almagest 7.5: pages 50, 88, 92, 110, 132, and 142 ed. Heiberg). Of these, Aldebaran, Pollux, Antares, and Betelgeuse are noticeably golden or orange-ish to the naked eye.
2. According to Humboldt, a passage in Galen defines kirrhós as ‘a pale fiery-red inclining to yellow’ (ein blasses Feuerroth, das in Gelb spielt; Galen, De methodo medendi book 12, x.832 ed. Kühn).

Humboldt cherry-picks his Galen, and even the passage he cites has problems. Galen’s exact words are

εἰ δ' ἄλλως ἐθέλεις ὀνομάζειν τὸ κιρρὸν χρῶμα, δύναιο ἂν λέγειν πυρρὸν ἢ ὠχρόν.
If you want to refer to the colour kirrhós differently you could say pyrrhós or ochrós (‘pale’).

In the 19th century, dictionaries treated pyrrhós as referring straightforwardly to pŷr ‘fire’. Humboldt seems to have in mind Pape’s definition (1st edition 1842):

feuerfarben, feuerroth, röthlich, in verschiedenen Abstufungen der Farben, bis zum Blonden hin ...
fire-coloured, fiery red, reddish, in various colour grades ranging to blonde ...

(Cf. Passow: ‘feuerfarb, feuergelb, feuerroth, goldgelb, überh. röthlich’.) In fact the exact linguistic relationship between pyrrhós and pŷr is unclear (Beekes 2010: 1264). Even to the extent that they’re connected, fire ... um, isn’t red.

Evidence from ancient usage of pyrrhós is a mixed bag. A pseudo-Aristotelian work implies a link to the colour of foxes; one late lexicographical source treats pyrrhós as a synonym for erythrós. Then again, another late lexicographical source defines erythrós as mélas, and pyrrhós as xanthós, keeping them as two separate colour categories. And Plato says pyrrhós is what you get if you mix xanthós (‘golden’) and phaiós (‘grey’) pigments.

The point is, there’s nothing simple about this.

Note. Ps-Aristotle, Physiognomonica 812a (xanthós-haired people have a bold spirit like lions, pyrrhós -haired people are villainous like foxes); Hesychios 6084, ii.201 Latte (ἐρυθραίνετο· ἐρυθρά ἐγένετο, πυρρά); Souda ε.3101 (ἐρυθρόν· τὸ μέλαν; similarly ε.3092), π.3235 (πυρρός· ὁ ξανθός); Plato, Timaios 68c. I am grateful to @SartrixMartiana and @oliveratlantis for pointing out the ps-Aristotle, Hesychios, and Souda examples to me. The new Cambridge Greek lexicon (2021) avoids ‘red’ in its definition of pyrrhós, except — paradoxically — when used of gold. The same lexicon omits kirrhós altogether.

Back to kirrhós. Setting aside Humboldt’s Galen passage, other contexts don’t support ‘red’. The most common use of kirrhós, in fact, is for a colour of wine — and it is not red wine.

Kirrhós wine is a white wine with relatively heavy colour: think chardonnay rather than pinot gris. It is invariably opposed to red wine, which is called mélas (‘dark red, deep brown, black’; mélas is also regularly used of blood).

Bear in mind that wine wasn’t backlit in antiquity. Ancient wine-drinkers saw their wine in the bottom of a ceramic kylix, not through the side of a transparent glass. This may help explain why they called ‘red’ wine mélas. A wine would have to be very pale to look erythrós (‘red’) in a kylix — more like a rosé.

Instead of kirrhós wines, use red ones [mélasin] ...

ps-Hippokrates, De mulierum affectibus 115

Wines are white [leukós], kirrhós, or red [mélas]. ... And Mnesitheos of Athens says: ‘Red wine is very good for growth. White wine is a very good diuretic, and is the thinnest. Kirrhós wine promotes dryness, and is good for digesting food.’

Athenaios 1.32c–d (= Mnesitheos fr. 46 ed. Bertier)

... keep watch on the testing of the wines, and always choose the one lightest in substance — the colour that Hippokrates usually calls kirrhós. You could also call it golden [xanthós]. Pale [ochrós] is also good, in between golden and white. In fact if you want to mix golden wine with white, you will produce a combination of both that is pale ...

Galen, De sanitate tuenda vi.335 ed. Kühn

Note. In Mnesitheos/Athenaios, ‘dryness’ (ξηρός) has nothing to do with the modern sense of a low-sugar wine: the word for that is αὐστηρός. See Boulay 2015: 277–279 on the vocabulary for the tastes of wine. ‘Dry’ here means foods that supposedly reduce phlegm, in the ancient medical theory of the four humours.

Here Galen sorts ‘white’ wines by the intensity of their colours, ranging from leukós, to ochrós, to kirrhós or xanthós. That is, he groups kirrhós firmly among white wines. He expands the range to red wines elsewhere:

You won’t find any wine that is thick and sweet that isn’t red [mélas]. ... There is no sweet wine that is white [leukós], but some are dry [austerós] and thick, some watery and light. Golden [xanthós] and kirrhós wines are moderately sweet, like Hippodamanteian wine, and the Faustian Falernian. Some are not sweet at all. Light red [erythrós] wines are thicker than these, just as others are (thicker) than them, as they approach the reds [mélas] in colour.

Galen, De bonis malisque sucis, vi.800–801 ed. Kühn

We can’t review kirrhós exhaustively. Galen uses the word over 100 times, far more than any non-medical writer. Almost every time it refers to wine. Let’s just highlight a few more sources that use kirrhós for things other than wine.

• A Hippokratic text (5th cent. BCE) describes the symptoms of a sick woman, and says her faeces were hypókirrhos.
• A fragment of Aristotle (4th cent. BCE) describes a fish as kirrhós, and the fragment is repeated elsewhere. But unhelpfully, the fish is of unknown species. (Liddell & Scott suggest it is a Labrus or wrasse, without basis.)
• An excerpt of a lost work by Aristophanes of Byzantion (3rd cent. BCE) states that the best milk is the thickest and ‘most kirrhós’; white [leukós] milk isn’t as nourishing.
• Dioskourides (1st cent. CE) says the best beeswax is hypókirrhos. Elsewhere he refers to three varieties of frankincense, one white [leukós], one hypókirros, and one ‘more kirrhós’; Frankincense is typically pale yellow.
• Galen (2nd cent. CE) refers to bitter vetch, acacia, and mastic as kirrhós. Acacia is yellow; mastic is pale yellow. Bitter vetch flowers are lilac, but since he’s talking about consuming it roasted, he must be talking about the seeds, which are yellow. (Another less helpful passage says that kirrhós is synonymous with two dialectal words ... both of unknown meaning.)
• Aetios (6th cent. CE) uses kirrhós as a synonym for hypóxanthos, ‘somewhat golden’, and assigns various foods to that colour including wheat and chickpeas — that is, light yellow.

Sources. ps-Hippokrates, Epidemics 7.11; Aristotle fr. 307 Rose = Athenaios 7.281f; Aristophanes, Historia animalium epitome 1.94; Dioskourides 2.83 (beeswax), 1.68 (frankincense); Galen, De remediis parabilibus xiv.366 Kühn (bitter vetch), xiv.533 (mastic, acacia), Glossary xix.129 (‘Zenodotos ... says the people of Sikyon refer to kirrhón as péllon’); Aetius i:proem = viii.1:29,18–21 ed. Oliveri.

In short, Ptolemy does not call Sirius ‘red’. A safer translation would be ‘cream-coloured, pale yellow’. There may still be a question of why he calls it that when it’s clearly white, but at least ‘red’ is off the table. One of Ceragioli’s explanations may still be needed for the ‘pale yellow’.

Photos reportedly taken in 2018 by Amanda Cross, an English amateur astronomer, using an out-of-focus camera to illustrate how a star’s colour varies when close to the horizon. Sirius is white when higher in the sky; the exceptional range of its colours close to the horizon lends support to Ceragioli’s argument. Source: EarthSky, March 2018.

One final point I’d better address is another place where Ptolemy uses hypókirrhos, in the astrological Tetrabiblos. There he claims that solar eclipses effectively put a colour filter over the world; and he links each ‘filter’ to one of the five planets. Hypókirrhos is the colour he associates with Mars (Tetrabiblos 2.90).

But once again, this doesn’t imply ‘red’. If you look at the whole list, it’s obvious he isn’t describing the colours of the planets themselves:

Planet	Associated colour in eclipses	Approximate translation
Saturn	(1) μέλας (mélas) or (2) ὑπόχλωρος (hypóchloros)	(1) black/dark red; (2) somewhat chartreuse
Jupiter	λευκός (leukós)	white
Mars	ὑπόκιρρος (hypókirrhos)	somewhat kirrhós
Venus	ξανθός (xanthós)	golden/tawny
Mercury	ποικίλος (poikílos)	multicoloured/dappled

Jupiter looks white to the naked eye, so that works. But Venus only starts to look a bit yellowish if you have a really good telescope. And it’s hard to see Saturn as ‘black’ or chartreuse, or Mercury as ‘dappled’. The Tetrabiblos passage adds no new information.

The sequel to The hundred and one dalmatians: Sirius, the Dog Star, addresses the dogs of the world from the top of Nelson’s Column and invites them all to come and live in space. Hey, man, it was the 60s. (Dodie Smith, The starlight barking [1967], ch. 10)

Roman sources: rubor and rutilus

With Roman writers, we don’t need to mess about with wine colours. As we saw earlier, Cicero says the Dog star ‘shines with rutilus light’; Horace refers to rubra Canicula ‘the red Dog star’; and Seneca refers to the rubor of Canicula. (Cicero, Aratea fr. 34.107–108 ed. Pellacani; Horace, Satires 2.5.39-40; Seneca, Quaestiones naturales 1.1.7.)

And rutilus, ruber, rubor certainly mean ‘red’ — in terms of their etymology, anyway. They’re cognate with Greek erythrós ‘red’, Sanskrit rudhirá- ‘red, bloody’, and Germanic rot, rood, red. Rubor regularly refers to blushing and inflammations. So at first sight, it does look like there’s a legitimate case for ‘red Sirius’ here.

First we’d better set aside one doubt about the Horace and Seneca: Canicula ‘small dog’ can also refer to Procyon, the most prominent star in Canis Minor, the ‘little dog’. Prokýon is in fact Greek for ‘dog in front’. And a recent scholarly commentary specifically identifies Horace’s Canicula as Procyon, not Sirius (Freudenburg 2021: 210). But I’m going to say that we’d better not assume that’s right. First, Procyon also looks white. Second, Sirius was proverbial in antiquity for scorching heat, rising as it does in the ‘dog days’ of summer, so Procyon should never be the default interpretation. For now at least, let’s assume there is a real question over Sirius.

The more substantive problem is that, though the words are etymologically linked to ‘red’, and though these words can sometimes mean ‘red’, they hardly ever actually refer to a literal hue. To illustrate, here’s the earliest attested appearance of rubor in Latin:

frigit saetas rubore ex oculis fulgens flammeo.
His hair roasts, he shines a flaming rubor from his eyes.

Accius, Meleager fr. 4 ed. Ribbeck

The metaphorical meaning ‘heat’ is much more salient here than a literal red hue.

And this isn’t a one-off. I’ve checked all appearances of rubor before the 1st century CE, and a few references in the 1st century, and only once does rubor refer to a literal hue. Its primary meaning is ‘shame, modesty’. Additional senses include ‘fiery heat’ (Accius, above); in the medical writer Celsus, it can mean either ‘blush’ or ‘inflammation’; once Cicero uses it for a blush cosmetic, evoking ‘shame’ still more metaphorically. And once, and once only, Vergil uses it to refer to a literal colour: the rubor of Tyrian dye.

Note. rubor = ‘shame, modesty’: Plautus, Captivi 962; Publilius Syrus R 8 (= 576 ed. Woelfflin); Catullus 42.16, 65.24; Cicero, De oratore 2.242, Topica 52, De re publica 4.6 fr. 1, Tusculae disputationes 4.(8).19, De natura deorum 1.(27).75, fr. 15.2; ps.-Cicero, Ad Herennium 4.(10).14; Tibullus 2.1.30; Vergil, Aeneid 12.66. rubor = cosmetic, standing for shame: Cicero, Orator (23).79 (‘let all cosmetics of candor and rubor be abolished (from oratory)’). rubor = ‘blush, inflammation’: Celsus, frequently. rubor = red dye: Vergil, Georgics 3.307.

Some of these things are (or can be) literally red, but the real theme connecting the primary meanings — ‘shame, blush, inflammation’ — is heat. Fire, an embarrassed blush, and an inflammation are each hot; Vergil makes it even clearer, with a rubor running through someone’s ‘heated face’ (rubor et calefacta per ora cucurrit).

In short, the most common meaning of rubor is actually ‘heat’. And for Sirius that makes perfect sense. Remember, Sirius was and still is proverbial for the scorching heat (or ‘dog days’) of midsummer.

In Seneca, the context is that he’s paraphrasing a discussion by Aristotle of atmospheric phenomena, explaining that ‘fires’ in the sky, such as comets, are caused by ‘evaporations’ from the earth, and these evaporations manifest as different phenomena depending on their heat. Seneca then gives Sirius, Mars, and Jupiter as celestial parallels to the terrestrial phenomenon. And he straight-up tells us that while Jupiter converts its brightness into ‘pure light’ without heat, in Sirius’ case it becomes rubor.

As for Horace, unfortunately, we have no context. His reference to rubra Canicula is a quotation from another poet, Furius Bibaculus, whose works have been lost.

Note. Seneca’s discussion is paraphrased from Aristotle, Meteorologica 341b; the reference to Sirius is Seneca’s own insertion. On Horace’s quotation of Furius, see Freudenburg 2021: 210–211.

We have one last ‘red Sirius’ passage to deal with. It’s in the fragments of Cicero’s Aratea, a Latin translation of Aratos’ Greek poem the Phainomena. Aratos’ Phainomena is a poem about astronomy, dating to the 3rd century BCE, which spends some time describing the major constellations.

Aratos himself doesn’t call Sirius ‘red’: he refers to the constellation as a whole as poikílos, ‘variegated’, in reference to the uneven brightness of its stars.

And behind [Orion’s] towering back, what a guardian
appears! A Dog walking on both his hind legs,
variegated [poikílos], however, not shining all over ...
... The tip of its
fierce chin is marked with a star which scorches [seiriáei]
more keenly than any other, and people call it
Sirius.

Aratos, Phainomena 326–337

The ‘scorching’ is another reference to the midsummer heat associated with Sirius. Cicero turns this passage into:

For beneath [Orion’s] feet there shines with rutilus light
the fiery Dog, shining and reflecting the light of the stars. ...
But not from all its body does it breathe flame
and make summer fires burst out with its strong breath:
all the blazing shines from its mouth and is cast upon mortals.

Cicero, Aratea fr. 34.107–112 ed. Pellacani

Two points to observe here:

1. Just like Aratos’ poikílos, Cicero’s ‘rutilus light’ refers to the constellation as a whole. Sirius itself is the star at the Dog’s mouth, the totus ... micans ... ardor in line 112.
2. While rutilus is linguistically linked to ruber ‘red’, it is routinely used to describe stars. And when describing stars, it doesn’t mean ‘red’: it means ‘bright, shining’.

It’s instructive to compare what Avienius does with the same passage, in another translation of Aratos dating to the 4th century:

[The Dog] burns, studded with rutilantes stars,
but its intensity isn’t the same all over ...
... The heavy blazing flows from its chin,
and burns the aether under a terrible title: Sirius.
When the sun turns its rutilos poles that way,
what suffering threatens people’s bodies, threatens the fields!

Avienius, Phaenomena 730–735

Avienius makes it clearer that rutilans doesn’t refer to Sirius, but to ... well, every other star in the constellation. And in line 734, it’s the sun itself that has a rutilus axis, not Sirius.

Can we hammer the point home even harder? Oh, you betcha. Avienius mentions Sirius again later on:

Meton set the very start of the year at the season
when Phoebus’ rutilus star scorches Cancer,
when the sea carries away Orion’s belt,
when Sirius burns with its blue [caeruleo] star.

Avienius, Phaenomena 1373–1376

Here again it’s the sun that’s rutilus, ‘the star of Phoebus’. And Sirius is — well, what do you know. He calls it blue. How about that.

And that isn’t a one-off either. Another astronomical poem by Manilius (1st century CE) refers to it as ‘blue’.

A great assurance of [the Dog’s] power are its colour, and the twinkling
of fire in its mouth — hardly less than the sun, except that it’s fastened
far off. Cold are the beams it brandishes in its blue [caeruleo] face.

Manilius, Astronomica 1.407–409

The paradox here isn’t that Manilius calls it blue, it’s that he calls Canis Major cold. For every other ancient author, Sirius is the symbol par excellence of midsummer sweltering.

The upshot

To sustain ‘red Sirius’ on Greco-Roman evidence, you’d have to ignore all the metaphorical flavour of rubor, which was really its primary meaning; you’d have to throw away every reference to kirrhós wine, milk, beeswax, chickpeas, acacia, and so on. And you’d have to ignore the fact that when Avienius uses the word rutilus, he doesn’t use it to refer to Sirius, he uses it to contrast with Sirius.

As well as that, you’d have to imagine that Sirius was red when Horace and Seneca were active, in the 1st centuries BCE and CE, but it turned blue by the time Manilius was active, also in the 1st century CE. Then it turned red again for Ptolemy in the 2nd century, then blue again when Avienius came along in the 4th century.

Stuff and nonsense. No, Virginia, ancient Greco-Roman astronomers did not describe Sirius as red.

Pale yellow, maybe. And if you really want to push it, maybe you can make that a problem. But given that that’s based entirely on a single throwaway line in Ptolemy ... I don’t fancy your chances.

References

• Barker, T. 1759. ‘Remarks on the mutations of the stars.’ Philosophical transactions 51: 498–504. [JSTOR | Internet Archive]
• Beekes, R. 2010. Etymological dictionary of Greek. Leiden/Boston.
• Boulay, T. 2015. ‘Wine appreciation in ancient Greece.’ In: Wilkins, J.; Nadeau, R. (eds.) A companion to food in the ancient world. Oxford. 273–282.
• Ceragioli, R. C. 1995. ‘The debate concerning “red” Sirius.’ Journal for the history of astronomy 26: 187–226. [Sci-Hub]
• —— 1996. ‘Solving the puzzle of “red” Sirius.’ Journal for the history of astronomy 27: 93–128. [Sci-Hub]
• Freudenburg, K. 2021. Horace. Satires book II. Cambridge.
• Holberg, J. B. 2007. Sirius. Brightest diamond in the night sky. Chichester.
• Von Humboldt, A. 1850. Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, vol. 3. Stuttgart. [Internet Archive]
• —— 1851. Cosmos. A sketch of a physical description of the universe (trans. E. C. Otté; English translation of the above). [Internet Archive]
• Jouanna, J. 2012 [1996]. ‘Wine and medicine in ancient Greece.’ In: Greek medicine from Hippocrates to Galen. Selected papers. Tr. N. Allies. Leiden. 173–193. Orig. publ. as ‘Le vin et la médicine dans la Grèce antique.’ Revue des études grecques 109.2: 410–434. [JSTOR]
• Pellacani, D. 2015. Cicerone. Aratea. Parte I: Proemio e catalogo delle costellazioni. Bologna.

How to make sense of ancient Greek colours

When people want to talk about how language affects colours, ancient Greece is a handy thing to point at. Fundamental errors pop up again and again, though.

1. Popular treatments (and scholarly discourse, too) rely far too much on dictionary definitions. Languages divide up the available colour palette in different ways. A colour term in one language does not necessarily correspond to a single term in another language. This is totally normal. It happens in modern languages too, and it has nothing to do with the physiology of the eye or the optic nerve. So a translation that works in one situation won’t work in others. Basically, for the purposes of scholarship, never translate colour terms.
2. Because of the reliance on dictionary definitions, 19th-20th century discussions often take an essentialist view, that there’s something real and objective about linguistic labels for colours. Historically, this view goes back to Isaac Newton’s canon of seven ‘primary’ colours — ROY G. BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet).

No word for ‘blue’? Homer would have called Alexis Tsipras’ jacket kyaneos. The shirt is glaukos. The catch is, Tsipras’ hair is kyaneos too.

3. More specifically: yes, you can say ‘blue’ in ancient Greek. More precisely, Greek has words for the area of the colour palette that English calls ‘blue’. But English ‘blue’ covers a huge region of the palette. Greek splits it into multiple smaller regions: glaukos for lighter, non-vivid shades; kyaneos for darker non-vivid shades ranging to black; porphyreos for vivid shades ranging from blue to violet to ruby, but also for less vivid shades in the middle of that range (light magenta, pink); lampros for metallic-silvery-azure. Yes, ancient sources do mention sky colour: it’s glaukos or lampros. It’s just that Homer doesn’t mention the sky’s colour (and why would he). For example: Cornutus, Compendium 10.18-20, compares sky colour to olive-tree foliage, because both are glaukos: glaukos covers a much larger area of the palette than ‘azure’ does. But Homer does refer to kyaneos clouds, and glaukos eyes and sea.
4. It’s often claimed that ancient Greek colour distinctions are based mainly on brightness. Well, it’s true that Homer mentions ‘dark red, brown, black’ (melas) much more often than most other colours. And it’s true that brightness and saturation matter for some colour terms. But the same is true of English. ‘Pink’, ‘brown’, and ‘olive’ are low-saturation or low-brightness versions of red, orange, and yellow; then there’s ‘azure’, ‘navy’, ‘crimson’, ‘scarlet’, ‘lime’, ‘indigo’, and so on. Don’t take it for granted that there’s something methodologically different about how ancient Greek organises its colour terms, just because one individual (Aristotle) happened to like sorting by brightness.

I have covered colour terms in Homer previously: (1) The bronze sky, (2) The wine-dark sea, both from January 2016. I feel the need for an update: The second one had a bit too much speculation in its last section, and a topic that’s under such a constant barrage of misinformation and confusion (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) is always worth revisiting.

Methodology

We can’t interview ancient Greek people, and we can’t conduct experiments to see where they would draw colour boundaries on a Munsell array. We have to rely on found evidence.

This does not mean looking at colour terms in translations of ancient texts, or even in a dictionary. See point 1 above. Translation is not one-to-one.

Dictionaries can help. But they aren’t evidence, they’re tools. Take for example the LSJ entry for kyaneos (1889 New York edition, with some modernisation):

properly, dark-blue, glossy-blue, of a serpent’s iridescent hues ... (Iliad 11.26, 38, Hesiodic Shield 167); of the swallow, Simonides 21; of the halcyon, Aristotle HA 9.14.1; of the skin of the porpoise, Aristotle HA 6.12.3; of the deep sea, Simonides 18, Euripides IT 7; ... 2. generally, dark, black, of the mourning veil of Thetis ...; of clouds ...; of the brows of Zeus ... of the hair of Hector ...

And so on. The entry gives the impression that there’s no single correct translation, and rightly so, and it lists a bunch of ancient sources as evidence (I’ve omitted most of them here). From there, we can do a lexical survey and look at the kinds of objects and surfaces that are called kyaneos; we can actually look at the sources, and expand beyond the ones that LSJ list; we can look at the context in the sources — metaphors, connotations, implied lighting conditions, and so on.

Even then, a dictionary is still just a tool, not an authority. Lexicographers may have their own biases about how colour works. Plato, Timaeus 68b-c, treats lampros as a colour, but if you look at the LSJ entry you’ll see no sign of that.

Yes, that’s partly because lampros usually denotes brightness. But it’s also partly because we don’t have a single word for ‘metallic silver with a blue tint’ in English. We really ought to, though, considering how often we see that colour. Like, for example, in the sky.

(Yes, I went there. An ancient Greek might well complain that modern English has no word for sky colour!)

A lampros car

Different languages, different boundaries

Translation is not one-to-one. Let’s illustrate: take ‘ground’ and ‘floor’. English-speakers are comfortable with the distinction between them. But in German there’s one word for both, Boden. If you’re translating German-to-English and you come across Boden, you cannot give the correct English equivalent unless you know the context: you have to know whether the Boden is indoors or outdoors.

Similarly with colour terms. German Lila and Purpur have no exact equivalents in English; English ‘crimson’ and ‘chartreuse’ have no exact equivalents in German. That doesn’t mean they can’t be translated! If you know the context, you can come up with a workaround. English ‘lilac’ and ‘violet’, are light shades of Lila: Lila is more general. Similarly Purpur covers English ‘magenta’, but it also includes royal purple and the red of a toadstool. Similar things apply to English ‘crimson’ and ‘chartreuse’. Hellgrün (‘light green’) is the dictionary rendering of ‘chartreuse’, but the English word is normally about halfway between ‘yellow’ and ‘green’.

What about ancient Greek? Well, think of your favourite image editor, and its colour picker:

Colour palette in the Windows programme Paint.NET, with HSV selectors in the red box

Outlined are the controls for three parameters which define the physical parameters of any colour uniquely. ‘Hue’ for the part of the spectrum the colour falls on; ‘saturation’ for the range from grey to vivid; and ‘value’ for lightness-darkness. (When Albert Munsell devised this system in the early 1900s he used ‘chroma’, not ‘saturation’.) In the colour circle at the left, the direction from the centre represents hue, and distance from the centre is saturation. It leaves out value: that would be a third dimension, extending from white to black.

Each colour term refers to a region of the palette. But the boundary of that region is arbitrary — to an extent, at least. There are non-linguistic constraints: the typical human eye has receptors for three colours, and that biases our colour perception ability; evolved cognitive traits may well give a higher priority to red, as a critical colour. But outside those biases, different languages may well assign colour terms to regions of different shapes and with different boundaries.

Most English speakers would be comfortable using ‘blue’ to refer to all of the top left quarter of the circle. But we wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable grouping all of the bottom right quarter under a single term.

In ancient Greek, by contrast, colour term usage suggests that porphyreos could cover at least a full quarter of the circle, not just ‘purple’. If you take non-vivid hues on the left and lower-left of the circle, and extend it to darker values as well, that’s glaukos. The top left, in a narrower band than English ‘blue’, is kyaneos, again weighted towards darker values. All of the bottom part of the circle would be chlōros.

Some terms do have tidy equivalents in English: erythros is ‘red’, leukos is ‘white’. But others aren’t nearly as easy. For them, to translate them correctly, you have to know the context.

A selection of ancient Greek colour terms, plotted on the colour palette based on lexical usage and a healthy dose of guesstimation. Note that this wheel is only one slice of the available range: the full palette would have a third dimension extending from white (maximum value) to black. Kyaneos extends to lower values all the way down to black (it gets used of hair and Ethiopian skin), and glaukos is also frequently a bit darker than this (the colour of olives or vine leaves). At their darkest shades, kyaneos and melas represent black approached from opposite sides of the wheel: in some passages of ancient texts they appear as synonyms. Some caveats: I’ve left out plenty of terms here (prasinos, ōchros, etc.). Plus, this is at best an approximation, at worst guesstimation, so allow plenty of room for corrections — not to mention disagreement between ancient sources.

There are other parameters too. Hue, saturation, and value represent only the physical characteristics of coloured light. English terms like ‘navy’ and ‘pastel’, and qualifiers like ‘vivid’ and ‘violent’, carry connotations of a colour being vivid or washed out in comparison with its context. Maria Michela Sassi, a scholar of ancient philosophy, identifies three other parameters as significant in Greek colour terms (2017):

• Saliency — related to how we as humans are programmed to perceive colours. For example, if we are hardwired to detect redness as a matter of urgency, then red will be much more universal than other colours.
• Colour event — the subjective experience of colour, including the context in which it is seen (relative vividness, lighting, etc.) and its cultural meaning.
• Glitter effect and material — scattering and textural effects resulting from the type of surface being observed. She cites porphyreos as a key example, in reference to things like the shimmering of pigeon neck-feathers. I’d suggest aithōps as another.

Sassi is absolutely correct that these are all important. Lampros, for example, has a specular quality that can’t be conveyed by a single point on the Munsell spectrum. There are languages where parameters like these are even more important. But today, I think, we can afford to take a simplified approach: we can still convey the problems with how ancient colour terms are represented, while sticking to Munsell’s parameters.

The main point to hammer home (and the Munsell spectrum is enough to make that point) is that English colour terms are neither more nor less arbitrary than ancient Greek. There’s no reason to treat ‘blue’ as an objectively defined region on the palette, any more than there is with Greek glaukos.

Gladstone, Newton, and others

William Gladstone, the 19th century British politician and Prime Minister, is often credited as the source of the idea that Homer had no word for ‘blue’. Sometimes he’s even said to have claimed that ancient Greek as a whole didn’t have ‘blue’. As we’ve seen, that’s false. But Gladstone isn’t totally guilty of creating the myth. (I’ve also seen it credited to Goethe: he’s completely innocent.)

Gladstone does make a starkly racist declaration that ancient colour systems are ‘less mature’ than contemporary English. He refers to the ‘paucity of [Homer’s] colours’ (1858: 457-458), at the same time as producing long lists of them. And he points out (correctly) that Homer never applies a colour term to the sky (483). But he never says, ‘There is no word for blue.’ (In one place he writes of three English colour terms that don’t have exact counterparts in Homer, and mistakenly writes ‘violet’ for ‘blue’: 459, line 6 from bottom. Even if he had written ‘blue’, as he obviously meant to, he’d still be wrong.)

Be that as it may, Gladstone’s assumptions are terrible. He’s an essentialist through and through. He assumes in advance that there are seven ‘primary’ colours — the seven of Newton’s canon — and that there’s something universal about them. He lists eight colour terms that appear in Homer, then carries on (1858: 459):

Now we must at once be struck with the poverty of the list which has just been given, upon comparing it with our own list of primary colours, which has been determined for us by Nature, and which is as follows:

Red. Orange. Yellow.

Green. Blue. Indigo.

Violet.

He adds ‘white’ and ‘black’ to these, then asserts that four of the Greek ones are equivalent to four of the English ones. On the next page he grudgingly adds another 13 Greek terms, and proclaims that they ‘have very slight claims indeed to be treated as adjectives of definite colour’. He doesn’t give any reasoning, but it’s clear enough. Many of them he takes as synonyms for ‘glittering, shiny’ or ‘gloomy’; several are comparisons, like ‘rose-coloured’ or ‘marbled’; and two, chlōros and glaukos, absolutely are colour terms, but Gladstone excludes them simply because they don’t line up with Newton’s seven.

Newton’s colour wheel. Left: Newton 1704, fig. 11. Right: a corrected version that actually follows Newton’s specifications (indigo is supposed to be the only segment that’s much narrower than the others; 1704: 114).

Gladstone’s overconfidence in the objectivity of English terms comes partly from Isaac Newton’s materialist approach. Newton (1704) studies the splitting of white light into component colours, the relationship between different coloured light and different refractive properties. The quantifiable nature of refraction gives the impression that everything he says is objective. And for the bits about refraction, that’s fine. But when we start adding on linguistic boundaries, as if they’re as real as the refractive indices, then there are going to be problems.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1810) criticised Newton too, but his critique wasn’t linguistic: it was more about the idea that refractive indices exhaust the nature of colour. We could say that Goethe’s understanding of colour was phenomenological: he preferred to understand colour in terms of qualia — irreduceable atoms of experientiality. Even today, qualia still pose problems for philosophers of mind. Personally, I think the more insidious problem is translation between languages. (Not that I subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — don’t go thinking that!)

Goethe is the most influential authority for the notion that ancient Greek colour terms are mainly about brightness. Gladstone certainly inherited that. So does Eleanor Irwin, in her study of colour terms in Greek poetry (1974). But the notion is much too reductionist. Early Greek philosophers are partly to blame too. Some of them tried to reduce everything in the cosmos to a single element, and hand in hand with that, thinkers like Theophrastus and Aristotle tried to reduce all colours to a simplistic dualism (Theophr. De sens. 59; Arist. De sens. 439a-440b; see Irwin 1974: 22-27).

But that kind of dualism is just what happens if you’re too reductionist. If you’re a 19th century scholar and you use ‘black, dark’ to translate all of kyaneos, melas, ioeis, and ēeroeidēs; ‘bright, shining’ for lampros, aithōn, aithōps, sigaloeis, charopos, argennos, and argos; and ‘grey’ for glaukos, phaios, and polios — well, don’t be surprised if you come away thinking there isn’t much variety in Greek colour terms.

Irwin’s study is an improvement, with an awareness of Munsell coordinates. She gives a review of scholarship from the 1700s to her own time. But she still succumbs to an awful lot of the older essentialism. On one level, she’s aware that Greek colour terms have a range of potential translations. But she still persists in pinning Greek words to a single English word. And, I’m afraid, she inherits a lot of Gladstone’s ethnocentrism.

The Homeric Greeks had not yet learned to think in abstract terms. ‘What is colour?’ is a question they would never have formulated, let alone been able to answer. (p. 22)

... ‘bright’ [λαμπρόν], not strictly a colour term at all ... (p. 25)

... if ξανθόν is ‘yellow’, then [Aristotle] lacked a particular term for orange. (p. 26)

I don’t know of any general treatments of Greek colour terminology in the last 40 years. The most recent good treatment, according to a 1982 review, is a 1977 Erlangen dissertation written by Helmut Dürbeck. Unfortunately it’s somewhat difficult to get hold of. I haven’t read it, and there are no copies in my country. We could do with a major update, published by a major publishing house.

Edit, several hours later: Professor Melissa Funke of the University of Winnipeg has very kindly alerted me to her book-chapter on the use of Greek colour terminology in 19th-20th century classical scholarship, Funke 2018. I haven’t got access to a copy yet, but I’m looking forward to reading it!

Metaphor

Irwin does at least show some willingness to allow that colour terms are sometimes metaphorical ... sometimes. ‘We find λειριόεις “lily-white” used of sound in Homer and Hesiod, and if we refuse to call it a “metaphor” ...’ (pp. 27-28). Why would we refuse to call it a metaphor, though? I’m guessing because Irwin was trained not to apply a modern concept to ancient poetry, on the grounds that that would be an anachronism. But just because ‘metaphor’ wasn’t widespread as a literary term, that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist — any more than ‘blue’ didn’t exist. Nowadays, in the 21st century, it’s harder to imagine why anyone would ever refuse to admit the possibility of metaphor in ancient poetry.

Some of the most troubling uses of colour terms in Greek — troubling to those who conclude that the ancients must have been physiologically different, or something like that — can easily be explained as metaphor. Take the ‘green’ blood in Euripides, Hekabe 126-127:

γνώμῃ δὲ μιᾷ συνεχωρείτην
τὸν Ἀχίλλειον τύμβον στεφανοῦν
αἵματι χλωρῷ

Unanimously you must concede
to adorn Achilles’ grave
with chlōros blood

Gladstone admits that this can’t be literally green blood, but ‘green’ in the metaphorical sense of ‘fresh, new’ — though, like Irwin, he too avoids the word ‘metaphor’. But Gladstone’s words betray a bias. He doesn’t credit Euripides for an ingenious oxymoron. Instead, he treats the line as an infelicity, and blames it on a deficiency in the ancient Greek colour sense (1858: 492: ‘When the epithet [chlōros] could be thus used, colour could be only very carelessly and faintly expressed in [ancient Greek] minds’).

Similar things apply to Homer’s ‘bronze sky’ and Pindar’s ‘blue earth’. ‘Bronze’ was never a colour term. ‘Bronze sky, iron earth’ is standard 7th-century-BCE imagery, with connotations of being harsh and unyielding: the same image appears in Assyrian and Hebrew texts of the same period (see my piece from 2016). And Pindar (Hymns fr. 33e.3-6) —

χθονὸς εὐρεί-
ας ἀκίνητον τέρας, ἄν τε βροτοί
Δᾶλον κικλῄσκουσιν, μάκαρες δ’ ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ
τηλέφαντον κυανέας χθονὸς ἄστρον.

(Delos,) the broad earth’s
immoveable wonder. To mortals, it’s called
Delos; to the blessed ones on Olympus,
‘the far-visible star of the kyaneos earth’.

On one level kyaneos is used here as a synonym for melas, in the familiar formula ‘black earth’. Apparently that’s enough to justify using kyaneos in a metaphorical sense. At the same time, we don’t know what the flavour of Pindar’s metaphor is: maybe it’s related to the idea that Delos is born from the dim-blue sea, maybe it’s something to do with religion, we just don’t know. Plenty of metaphors are lost on us now. Homer’s ‘wine-looking sea’ is one of them. There are plenty of theories as to what metaphors like that mean, but often there’s no clear winner.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Let’s end with a mention of Sapir-Whorf. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that linguistic categories have an effect on cognition.

In connection with colours, the idea would be that if the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for ‘blue’ — which, as we’ve seen, isn’t true in any sensible way — then that would mean they weren’t even able to conceive of the colour blue. In some popular accounts, this might even mean that they were unable to perceive the colour blue!

This is, of course, bollocks. It would make about as much sense if someone were to say: Greek has a word, glaukos, which denotes the colour of a clear sky and vine leaves, and modern English doesn’t, so that must mean that English-speakers can’t even perceive the colour of the sky or of vine leaves!

Strong Sapir-Whorf is nonsense, and all cognitive scientists know that.

Much, much weaker forms of the hypothesis are still being explored, though. For example, one recent study of the effects of colour terminology on speakers of Mandarin and Mongolian (He et al. 2019) suggests that, while different linguistic boundaries between colour terms have no noticeable effect on people’s ability to recognise and categorise colours, they do have an effect on the speed at which people sort colours. And, moreover, the study finds that this effect is linked to verbal working memory: that supports the idea that language is involved in some parts of cognitive processing.

But that doesn’t mean that ‘the way you see colour depends on what language you speak’, as a 2018 article in The Conversation put it. That title was so misleading that the authors had to step into the comments and try to explain what they meant. But their explanations didn’t exactly clear things up —

This does not mean that we can´t physically perceive the full gamut of colours, but that we do perceive them differently depending on the words that we hold to describe them.

‘Perceive them differently’ is very, very vague. It doesn’t need to be as vague as that. Language has an effect on cognitive processing of colour: that’s clear, and it isn’t difficult to explain. But ‘we perceive them differently’ is a gigantic overstatement. It implies that there’s something incommunicable about colour terms in different languages. It begs the question, in other words. It takes qualia for granted. And it does so before even starting to explore whether we really ought to be talking about ineffable qualia. It’s much more precise to say only what is meant: that we’re talking about how fast people can sort colours, and how this is affected by language.

References

• Dürbeck, H. 1977. Zur Charakteristik der griechischen Farbenbezeichnungen. Habelts Dissertationsdrücke, kl. Phil. 27 (Bonn).
• Funke, M. 2018. ‘Colourblind: the use of Greek colour terminology in cultural linguistics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’ In: Varto, E. (ed.) Brill’s companion to classics and early anthropology. Brill. 255-276.
• Gladstone, W. E. 1858. ‘Homer’s perceptions and use of colour.’ In: Studies on Homer and the Homeric age, vol. 3 of 3. The University Press (Oxford). 457-499.
• Goethe, J. W. von 1810. ‘Erste Abtheilung. Griechen.’ In: Zur Farbenlehre, vol. 2 of 2. J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung (Tübingen). 1-59. (= 1879. Goethe’s Werke, vol. 36. Gustav Hempel (Berlin). 10-47; = html text version).
• He, H., et al. 2019. ‘Language and color perception: evidence from Mongolian and Chinese speakers.’ Frontiers in psychology 14 Mar. 2019, 10:551.
• Irwin, E. 1974. Colour terms in Greek poetry. Hakkert (Toronto).
• Newton, I. 1704. Opticks: or, a treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light. Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford (London). (Archive.org copy)
• Sassi, M. M. 2017. ‘The sea was never blue.’ Aeon.co.

Colours in Homer #2: the wine-dark sea

Homer regarded wine, the sea, and sheep as all being the same colour, which is 'red'.

-- QI, series 2 episode 1 'Blue' (Oct. 2004)

As we saw last time, it's easy to get mixed up over colour terms in another language. Let's repeat an important point: different languages divide up the spectrum differently. As a result, colour terms often do not have one-to-one equivalents in different languages.

We can't conduct experiments to see exactly which labels a live ancient Greek would attach to which shades, so we have to rely on surviving texts and how they use colour terms. The colours I listed last time come out roughly as follows:

'Kyaneos': porpoise and barn swallow (source: Wikimedia.org)

• kyaneos -- conventional translation 'blue'. Used of: porpoises, a swallow's feathers, black hair. So actual range = medium grey-blue ranging towards black; not vivid.
• melas -- conventional translation 'black'. Used of: soil, blood, wine, sacrificial rams. So actual range = black, but also ranging to deep browns and reds.
• porphyreos (in Homer porphyrios) -- conventional translation 'purple'. Used of: flowers (of unspecified species) and dyes; also blood, blushing cheeks, rainbows. So actual range = vivid colours of any luminosity throughout the indigo-lavender-violet part of the palette (and perhaps beyond). Porphyreos doesn't have a one-to-one equivalence to any English colour-term.
• chlōros -- conventional translation 'green' or 'pale'. Used of: the complexions of frightened people, leaves, live plants; also figuratively to mean 'unripe'. So actually = colours around chartreuse: low-saturation, high-luminosity colours with a high yellow component (i.e. not pink).
• glaukos -- conventional translation 'grey'. Used of: (dull green) olives, grapes, vine leaves; (blue) eye colour, the sea, a clear sky. Ancient technical descriptions consistently treat it as a light shade of kyaneos; see the Plato passage below. So actual range= light blue to dull green, with the latter also understood as a greenish-grey. Like porphyreos, this term doesn't have a one-to-one equivalence to any English colour-term.
• leukos -- conventional translation 'white'. Used of: snow, marble, an old person's hair, unusually fair skin. Pretty much = English 'white'.
• erythros -- conventional translation 'red'. Used of: wine, ruddy complexions, blushes, clay, egg yolk. Egg yolk is more prototypically ōchros for the Greeks (conventionally translated 'yellow'); but yolk colour is affected by a hen's diet, and hens that are given scraps often produce dark orange yolks. So 'red', but also used for neighbouring colours figuratively, as also in English ('red robin', 'red-head').

Estimated palette ranges
for the colours listed above

One important piece of testimony is an account by Plato of how vision supposedly works (Timaeus 68b-c, 4th century BCE). The theory of colour perception is obviously very inaccurate. However, it has historical value for the fact that it gives colour terms for several combinations of pigments:

And again, when the intermediate kind of fire reaches the liquid of the eyes and is mixed with it, it doesn't gleam: rather, because of how the fire's light in blended through the moisture, it emits the colour of blood, and we call it erythros. But when lampros ('bright') is mixed with erythros and leukos, we call it xanthos ('light brown, fawn')... And erythros mixed with melas and leukos produces alourgos (lit. 'sea-worked'; apparently close to Tyrian purple in Xenophon Cyr. 8.3.3); but it is orphninos ('dark, dim'?) if these (pigments) are more burnt and more melas is added. And pyrrhos ('red-orange, russet') is made from xanthos and phaios ('grey'); phaios is made from leukos and melas; and ōchros ('yellow') is made from leukos mixed with xanthos. When leukos combined with lampros is poured into deep melas, it produces the colour kyaneos. And kyaneos mixed with leukos gives glaukos, and pyrrhos mixed with melas gives prasios ('light green' or 'khaki').

The sky. After all this, by the way, it turns out that the question asked in QI, 'What colour was the sky in ancient Greece?', actually has the answer: either glaukos 'light blue' or lampros 'bright', depending on context. Neither is very strongly supported in ancient testimony, but ancient Greek texts just don't talk about the colour of the sky much. We find clear references to blue sky as glaukos in the 1st century CE writer Lucius Annaeus Cornutus (Compendium 10.20 -- he also likens it to olive-tree foliage, confirming that that is also part of the glaukos area of the colour palette) and in the 3rd century CE writer Philostratus (Life of Apollonius 2.5). Lampros, 'bright', is less specifically about colour than the other terms: more properly it refers to the aithēr, the intense light that supposedly lies beyond the misty aēr 'air, atmosphere' in ancient Greek cosmology. Lampros is regularly used of the sun and stars, and more metaphorically of things like 'clear' voices, 'brilliant' diction, and 'splendid' horses. Yet Plato, above, treats it as a pigment; and a handful of passages associate it with the sky itself, like Suda χ.326 and Iamblichus De mysteriis 2.7 ('earthly things display an earthly and blacker [melanteron] fire, heavenly things a brighter [lamproteron] fire'). Cornutus, too, calls the sky pyrōdēs 'fiery in appearance' (Compendium 2.10).

There's no doubt that lampros would have been the most obvious term to describe a bright clear Mediterranean day. But someone who wanted to talk specifically about its colour would call it glaukos, as in Cornutus and Philostratus. (An overcast day would presumably be 'grey', phaios.)

Now, we still need to deal with the QI claim that Homer refers to red wine, red sea, and red sheep.

Red wine (source: Wikimedia.org)

Sheep. This one is just a misunderstanding: Homer doesn't call sheep 'red' anywhere. It's probably based on a few passages where lambs or rams are called melas 'black'. Melas can also be used of blood, so that's probably what caused the confusion. For the record, Homeric sheep are prototypically white: they're argennos in five places (literally 'silver-clothed'), and argyphos in two others (literally 'silver-woven'). (And by the way, as it happens red sheep do actually exist -- but they probably aren't relevant.)

Wine. The adjectives used for wine in early Greek epic poetry are:

• aithops: conventional translation 'shining, gleaming'; also used of burning torches, smoke (glittering with sparks), and the mythical Aithiopes (whose skin was burnt by the sun). Used for wine 12× in the Iliad, 10× Odyssey, 2× Hesiodic Works and Days.
• erythros: 'red'. 7× Odyssey, 1× Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
• melas: 'black, deep red'. 3× Odyssey.

So wine gleams, but its colour is prototypically red. There, that was easy!

The sea. The business of the 'red sea' is tied up with the colour of wine. The 'red sea' claim on QI is almost certainly based on a frequent formulaic phrase in the Homeric Odyssey, epi oinopa ponton, conventionally translated as 'on the wine-dark sea'. Based on the discussion of wine above, 'wine-dark sea' sounds like it ought to mean 'red sea'.

This famous phrase lacks any totally certain explanation. Stephanie West's 1988-90 commentary on Odyssey books 1-4 takes an agnostic position, simply calling it 'puzzling'. In 1983, R. Rutherford-Dyer argued, based on his own observations, that it referred to the colour of the Aegean Sea at particular times of day ('Homer's wine-dark sea', Greece & Rome 30: 125-8; subscription required). A few years earlier, in 1978, C. H. Gordon argued that 'wine-dark sea' was a traditional East Mediterranean poetic phrase also supposedly found in Hebrew taršiš -- according to Gordon, 'a qaṭlîl formation of the denominative root trš derived from tîrôš, "wine," paralleling ḥaklîl, and meaning "wine-red" or "wine-dark"' ('The wine-dark sea', Journal of Near Eastern Studies 37: 51-2; subscription required).

Personally I'm not taken with the romantic suggestion of colours at sunset. Yes, the Aegean can take striking colours at that hour, but an explanation that relies on a specific time of day needs something to justify interpreting it with that specificity. I'm even less impressed by Gordon's argument: it relies on oinops meaning 'wine-dark'. The trouble is, that's not a firm foundation. Strictly literally, the phrase straightforwardly means 'wine-faced sea', from οἶνος 'wine' + ὄψ 'face'.

[Corrigendum, 31 March: a 1995 article by Beekes shows that this is wrong. See comments. 'Wine' + 'face' would be οἰνο- + ωπ-; οἰνο- + οπ- is actually 'wine-looking', that is, 'looking like wine'. I've silently corrected the translations below, where relevant.]

Sunset on the Aegean Sea (source: TrekEarth.com)

The phrase 'wine-dark sea' didn't find its popularity in English until the first English prose translations of Homer in the 1880s-90s (Iliad; Odyssey). Andrew Lang contributed to both translations, so perhaps he bears the greatest responsibility. I'd guess Lang felt 'wine-dark' had a better ring than 'wine-looking' -- and of course it absolutely does sound better.

That interpretation has a long-standing history prior to Lang, though. 'Wine-dark' appears as a secondary translation for oinops in the Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon. The older Greek-German dictionaries on which Liddell & Scott was based, those of Passow and Schneider, refer to darkness ('Dunkelheit') and dark red ('dunkelroth'). These translations probably go back ultimately to the early Byzantine lexicographer Hesychius. His dictionary contains these entries [edit: and two more on the previous page]:

οἰνωπόν· πορφύρεον, μέλανα. ...
οἰνώψ· οἶνοψ. μέλαν.

wine-faced [noun]: porphyreos, melas. ...
wine-faced [adjective]: 'wine-looking', melas.

So, why does Hesychius gloss 'wine-faced' as 'black'? Probably because water in early epic, especially drinking water, is often melas: three rivers have melas water (Iliad 2.625; 21.202; Odyssey 6.91); ships take on stores of melas water (Od. 4.359); the sea nymph Calypso disappears into a melas wave (Od. 5.353); the sea around Charybdis is melas (Od. 12.104); a freshwater spring has melas water (Od. 13.409), and in five places there is a κρήνη μελάνυδρος 'melas-watered spring'. A mostly lost epic, the Cypria, referred to the 'barren melas water (of the sea)' (fr. 9.6 ed. Bernabé).

And how does that get us to wine? The answer can only be that Homer calls wine melas in three places. Wine is melas; water is melas; therefore (goes the argument) 'wine-looking' is 'dark'.

But as we saw above, Homer doesn't just call wine melas: he calls it erythros more often, and aithops more often still. So Hesychius' gloss doesn't look well-founded either. West, commenting on the phrase in Od. 1.183, is also unimpressed: 'the conventional rendering "wine-dark",' she writes, 'does not inspire confidence, [but] it is more convincing than alternative suggestions.'

Can we do any better? Maybe. I suggest that an explanation for the 'wine-looking sea' can be conjectured based on the Homeric system of metrical formulas. My suspicion is that epi oinopa ponton was designed to be a substitute for an unattested phrase, *ep' aithopa ponton 'on the bright-looking sea', but with a different rhythm. Hypothetically, an epic poet could choose which formula to use depending on the rhythmical context. *Ep' aithopa ponton was the original version (since it actually makes sense), but either it died out in the pre-Homeric phase of the epic tradition, or it was never permissible in strict hexameter; as a result only the oinopa variant is attested.

The hypothesised *aithopa/oinopa pair follows a pattern of rhythmic variants like the following --

polyēraton eidos echousa
epēraton eidos echousa

'(a woman) possessing lovely beauty'

-- where the formula is versatile because a syllable can be added or removed without a second thought. A pair of this kind would be absolutely typical for the epic tradition.

Technical discussion: [Note: a few changes and corrections have been made to this discussion, 20/1/16.]

Epi oinopa ponton has the extra syllable because the preposition epi ('on') gets abbreviated before aithopa ('bright-looking') but not before oinopa ('wine-looking'). In phrases like epi + aithopa, ancient Greek regularly contracted a short vowel at the end of one word when followed by a vowel in the next word. However, that couldn't happen with epi + oinopa, because when the formula was devised, oinopa had an extra consonant, w, which had dropped out of the epic dialect by the time the Iliad got written down. Originally the phrase was *epi w(o)īnopa (*w(o)īn- 'wine' comes from the same root that produced Latin vinum, originally pronounced wīn-). Again, it is absolutely typical for Homeric formulas to respect this lost consonant when deciding whether to contract a vowel or not. The phenomenon is known as 'observing digamma': digamma was an archaic letter used to write the w sound in some parts of Greece. Aithops never had a w sound at the beginning (it comes from the verb aith- 'gleam, shine') so there would be nothing to prevent contraction of epi + aithopa → *ep' aithopa.

Why do we never see *ep' aithopa ponton? If this conjecture has a weak point, this is it, because there is no convincing explanation. The formula epi oinopa ponton appears after a fourth-foot caesura: *ep' aithopa ponton in the same position would violate Hermann's bridge. Put simply, what that means is that it's nearly impossible in Homeric metre. Given that, where could it have come from?

1. Could the formula have developed in a prehistoric form of the hexameter and then died out once Hermann's bridge developed? No: we have to presume that Hermann's bridge was an emergent feature of the forces that created the hexameter in the first place, not an epiphenomenon.
2. Could the aithopa variant have appeared in a proto-hexameter where it was possible to have lines with fewer prolongations, that is to say with five feet rather than six? In such a line it would follow a tritotrochaic caesura, the most typical position for formula-pairs of this type. No, this can't be right either. If so, we'd expect to see evidence of other formulas where the same thing happened, with more violations of Hermann's bridge.
3. Could the formula have developed in an Aeolic metre with dactylic prolongation but without the same constraints as hexameter, and subsequently epic poets borrowed the oinopa variant but not the aithopa variant? Again no: (a) what would be a poet's motivation to avoid the aithopa variant? Again, we have to presume Hermann's bridge is an emergent feature of the formulaic system, not a prescriptive rule. (b) We have no attestations of aithops/aithopa in extant lyric poetry of any kind: prior to 400 BCE, the only other uses of the word in verse are in Euripides' tragedies (3×; perhaps also a doubtful occurrence in Thespis fr. 4. Two are in melic/lyric passages, Suppl. 1019 and Bacchae 594; the third is the only one that refers to wine, Eur. fr. 896, a just-so rationale for why wine is called aithops).
4. Perhaps *ep' aithopa ponton was never actually used in verse, precisely because it was metrically impossible, and oinopa was devised specifically to compensate for that (at a time when the w of *woinopa was still pronounced). This is the only possibility that is at all likely.

Now that I've undermined my own conjecture in the 'technical discussion' above, I'd better also lay out a summary of the reasoning in support of it:

1. Aithops and wine are each closely associated with the other in early epic poetry:
1. aithops is the most typical adjective for wine (24×; cf. erythros 8×, melas 3×);
2. wine is the substance most typically described as aithops (24×; cf. 'bronze' 12×, 'smoke' 1×, 'hunger' 1×).
2. Aithopa and oinopa are closely parallel forms.
3. Oinopa ponton is almost impenetrable on its own, but makes perfect sense if it is understood as a substitute for a similar-sounding word meaning 'gleaming, shining'.

I believe that's plenty to make it a sensible conjecture, at least on a par with Hesychius', Gordon's, and Rutherford-Dyer's explanations. But it does involve a secondary conjecture (or rather speculation) about why we never see the aithopa variant. The upshot is that we still don't have a rock-solid explanation of why Homer's sea is 'wine-looking' -- but there are some good possibilities that we can suspect.

Colours in Homer #1: the bronze sky

Today's myth owes much of its popularity to the British comedy quiz series QI. Here's the relevant bit, from series 2 episode 1 'Blue' (first broadcast October 2004):

Stephen Fry: What colour was the sky in ancient Greece?
Jo Brand: Blue, if that picture's any good.
[KLAXON]
Stephen: Oooooh no! It wasn't, I'm afraid, blue. Um, I should have, aheheh, I should have told you that it was ancient Greece. And I did.
Jo: Yeh you did.
Stephen: Yah, yah, and, and they didn't, they didn't take photographs in ancient Greece, so that might have been a hint that the photograph was of modern Greece.
Jo: Well when I know -
Stephen: Yah, no, you fell into our beautifully -
Sean Lock: It could be a very very good carving.
Stephen: It could be, I suppose. Um -
Bill Bailey: Could it perhaps have been darker blue, 'cause it's sort of faded a little bit, over time?
Stephen: Well, yes, in point of fact -
Alan Davies: What we call blue they called something else?
Stephen: Well no the ancient Greeks don't - didn't call anything blue.
Alan: They didn't look up ever?
Stephen: No they didn't call anything blue.
Alan: They didn't ha - have colours?
Bill: No word for blue?
Stephen: They had colours, but they didn't have a word for blue.
Bill: Aaaaah.
Alan: They didn't have a word for blue? Well what did they say? 'The sky.'
Stephen: 'Bronze'.
Alan: Bronze?
Stephen: Yes, they called it 'the bronze'. Homer called it 'bronze-coloured'.
Alan: I've got no time for these Greeks.
[A couple of minutes' dialogue omitted]
Stephen: Now in a similar spirit, ahh, Homer regarded wine, the sea, and sheep as all being the same colour, which is 'red'. To us colours are so obvious that this seems peculiar, but colour is just one way of describing tones.

Predictable answer alert!

This idea was revived in March 2015 when a spate of news articles eagerly reported a study claiming that humans two thousand years ago couldn't perceive the colour blue. The popularity of this story was in turn driven by a kafuffle over The Dress that hit internet social forums a couple of weeks earlier. (For reference, news media interpreted the study as supporting the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that cognition is strictly constrained by language; strong Sapir-Whorf is however broadly discredited. Weak Sapir-Whorf is the subject of ongoing research.)

Homeric epic does indeed refer to 'bronze sky' three times: at Iliad 5.504, Iliad 17.425, and Odyssey 3.2. It's just that there isn't the slightest reason to interpret it as a colour term. This becomes a bit more obvious if you look at other uses of 'bronze' as an adjective in Homer. Iliad 5.785:

Στέντορι εἰσαμένη μεγαλήτορι χαλκεοφώνῳ

looking like the great-hearted bronze-voiced Stentor

(This is where we get the adjective 'stentorian'.) Iliad 18.222 likewise refers to Achilleus' ὄπα χάλκεον 'bronze voice'. Next, Iliad 11.241-2 describes the death of Iphidamas as follows:

ὣς ὃ μὲν αὖθι πεσὼν κοιμήσατο χάλκεον ὕπνον
οἰκτρὸς ἀπὸ μνηστῆς ἀλόχου...

In this way (Iphidamas) toppled and fell into a bronze sleep,
pitiful, away from his wedded wife...

And then there's Iliad 5.704, which refers to the war-god Ares as χάλκεος 'bronze'.

It should be pretty transparent that the meaning is figurative in all of these passages. That being the case, it'd be daft to assume that when it gets used of the sky -- and only in the case of the sky -- it suddenly starts being a colour term.

Exactly what shade of metaphor we're looking at in the 'sky' passages is less obvious. The simplest and most likely interpretation is that it's supposed to mean 'pitiless, terrible', as in the Iphidamas death-scene. In that case 'bronze sky' = 'pitiless sky' is a pathetic fallacy. Another, more literalist, reading is to take it as a reference to the 'bronze-pathed house of Zeus', a phrase that appears elsewhere (on the understanding that Zeus lives in the sky). And one more possibility which is unsupported by any other evidence, but nonetheless entertaining, is that it could be a reference to the sky as an upturned cauldron: one word for 'cauldron' was χαλκίον, derived from the word for bronze.

Most doubts over the 'pitiless, terrible' interpretation can be dispelled by looking at parallels in contemporary ancient Near Eastern sources. Exactly the same trope appears in the succession treaty of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, written in 672 BCE, almost exactly contemporary with the Iliad (known to Biblical scholars as the 'vassal treaty of Esarhaddon' or VTE):

528 qaq-qar-ku-nu ki-i AN.BAR le-pu-šu me-me-ni
529 ina ŠÀ-bi lu la i-par-ru-’a
530 ki-i šá TA* ŠÀ AN-e šá UD.KA.BAR A.AN la i-za-nun-a-ni
531 ki-i ha-an-ni-e zu-un-nu na-al-šû ina ŠÀ A.ŠÀ.MEŠ-ku-nu
532 ta-me-ra-ti-ku-nu lu la [i]l-lak ku-um zu-un-nu
533 pe-e’-na-a-ti ina KUR-ku-nu li-iz-nu-na

May they (the gods) make your ground like iron (so that) nothing can sprout from it. Just as rain does not fall from a brazen sky so may rain and dew not come upon your fields and your meadows; instead of dew may burning coals rain on your land.

Succession treaty of Esarhaddon §§63-4 (ed. and transl. Parpola and Watanabe)

And here it is again in the Hebrew Bible, about half a century later:

וְהָי֥וּ שָׁמֶ֛יךָ אֲשֶׁ֥ר עַל־רֹאשְׁךָ֖ נְחֹ֑שֶׁת וְהָאָ֥רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־תַּחְתֶּ֖יךָ בַּרְזֶֽל׃

יִתֵּ֧ן יְהוָ֛ה אֶת־מְטַ֥ר אַרְצְךָ֖ אָבָ֣ק וְעָפָ֑ר מִן־הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ יֵרֵ֣ד עָלֶ֔יךָ עַ֖ד הִשָּׁמְדָֽךְ׃

The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. The LORD will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed.

Deuteronomy 28:23-4 (Westminster Leningrad text + NRSV)

(No one has ever tried to interpret this as having anything to do with colours!) The figure of speech in Homer is unlikely to be independent, especially considering how the trope appears in the Iliad 17 passage:

ὣς οἳ μὲν μάρναντο, σιδήρειος δ' ὀρυμαγδός
χάλκεον οὐρανὸν ἷκε δι' αἰθέρος ἀτρυγέτοιο.

So they fought one another, and the iron din
reached as far as the bronze sky through the barren ether.

Iliad 17.424-5 (ed. West)

Terrestrial iron, heavenly bronze: this is no coincidence. The image must have been borrowed from Near Eastern literature relatively recently: (a) the earliest evidence of iron smelting in Greece dates to ca. 900 BCE, and the poetic image wouldn't make much sense if the material wasn't available; (b) all our attestations, Akkadian, Greek, and Hebrew, come from the 600s BCE. The original intent is likely to have been more or less the same as in the Hebrew and Akkadian passages.

And for reference, Homeric Greek did have two words that can mean 'blue': kyaneos and glaukos. Greek colour terms divided up the spectrum differently from how English and most modern western European languages do. Kyaneos covered the area of the spectrum ranging from black towards dark blue, and was also used for what in English would be called 'black' hair. Glaukos included light shades of green and blue with relatively low saturation. Other colours that don't line up with English categories are melas (conventionally translated 'black'), porphyrios ('purple'), and chlōros ('green'): in reality melas covered the range from black to brown to dark orangey-red, porphyrios referred to a range of deep vivid colours; chlōros and glaukos divide up pale colours between them. Erythros ('red') and leukos ('white') are just about the only ancient Greek colour terms that mostly line up with their conventional English translations. There's nothing especially weird or wonderful about this: if you think of English colour terms that revolve around the prototypical 'blue', like cyan, azure, indigo, navy, turquoise, and aquamarine, and try to think of their equivalents in another language, you're not going to come up with a set of one-to-one correspondences.

What of Stephen Fry's comment about Homer regarding wine, the sea, and sheep as 'red'? More on that next time: that will take us into the wacky world of Homeric formulas.