Yellow, too, seems strangely absent from the Greek lexicon. The simple word xanthoscovers the most various shades of yellow, from the shining blond hair of the gods, to amber, to the reddish blaze of fire. Chloros, since it's related to chloe (grass), suggests the colour green but can also itself convey a vivid yellow, like honey.
The Ancient Greek experience of colour does not seem to match our own. In a well-known aphorism, Friedrich Nietzsche captures the strangeness of the Greek colour vocabulary:
How differently the Greeks must have viewed their natural world, since their eyes were blind to blue and green, and they would see instead of the former a deeper brown, and yellow instead of the latter (and for instance they also would use the same word for the colour of dark hair, that of the corn-flower, and that of the southern sea; and again, they would employ exactly the same word for the colour of the greenest plants and of the human skin, of honey and of the yellow resins: so that their greatest painters reproduced the world they lived in only in black, white, red, and yellow).How is this possible? Did the Greeks really see the colours of the world differently from the way we do?
[My translation]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, too, observed these features of Greek chromatic vision. The versatility of xanthos and chloros led him to infer a peculiar fluidity of Greek colour vocabulary. The Greeks, he said, were not interested in defining the different hues. Goethe underpinned his judgment through a careful examination of the theories on vision and colours elaborated by the Greek philosophers, such as Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle, who attributed an active role to the visual organ, equipped with light coming out of the eye and interacting with daylight so as to generate the complete range of colours.
Goethe also noted that ancient colour theorists tended to derive colours from a mixture of black and white, which are placed on the two opposite poles of light and dark, and yet are still called 'colours'. The ancient conception of black and white as colours - often primary colours - is remarkable when compared with Isaac Newton's experiments on the decomposition of light by refraction through a prism. The common view today is that white light is colourless and arises from the sum of all the hues of the spectrum, whereas black is its absence.
Goethe considered the Newtonian theory to be a mathematical abstraction in contrast with the testimony of the eyes, and thus downright absurd. In fact, he claimed that light is the most simple and homogeneous substance, and the variety of colours arise at the edges where dark and light meet. Goethe set the Greeks' approach to colour against Newton's for their having caught the subjective side of colour perception. The Greeks already knew, Goethe wrote, that: 'If the eye were not Sun-like, it could never see the Sun.'
Another explanation for the apparent oddness of Greek perception came from the eminent politician and Hellenist William Gladstone, who devoted a chapter of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858) to 'perceptions and use of colour'. He too noticed the vagueness of the green and blue designations in Homer, as well as the absence of words covering the centre of the 'blue' area. Where Gladstone differed was in taking as normative the Newtonian list of colours (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). He interpreted the Greeks' supposed linguistic poverty as deriving from an imperfect discrimination of prismatic colours. The visual organ of the ancients was still in its infancy,hence their strong sensitivity to light rather than hue, and the related inability to clearly distinguish one hue from another. This argument fit well with the post-Darwinian climate of the late 19th century, and came to be widely believed. Indeed, it prompted Nietzsche's own judgment, and led to a series of investigations that sought to prove that the Greek chromatic categories do not fit in with modern taxonomies.
Today, no one thinks that there has been a stage in the history of humanity when some colours were 'not yet' being perceived. But thanks to our modern 'anthropological gaze' it is accepted that every culture has its own way of naming and categorising colours. This is not due to varying anatomical structures of the human eye, but to the fact that different ocular areas are stimulated, which triggers different emotional responses, all according to different cultural contexts.
So was Goethe right that the Greek experience of colours is quite peculiar? Yes, he was. There is a specific Greek chromatic culture, just as there is an Egyptian one, an Indian one, a European one, and the like, each of them being reflected in a vocabulary that has its own peculiarity, and not to be measured only by the scientific meter of the Newtonian paradigm. The question then is: how can we hope to understand how the Greeks saw their world?
Let's begin with the colourimetric system, based on the Color Sphere created in 1898 by an American artist named Albert Henry Munsell. According to this model, any colour sensation can be defined through three interacting aspects: the hue, determined by the position in the Newtonian spectrum, by which we discriminate one colour from another; the value or lightness, ranging from white to black; and the chroma, which corresponds to the purity or saturation of the colour, depending on the wavelength distribution of light. Fire-red and sky-blue are highly saturated, whereas grey is not at all.
Add to these the concept of saliency, that is, the capacity of a colour to catch visual attention, and the defective definition of blue and green that Gladstone interpreted as a symptom of colour-blindness can be explained since the linguistic definition of hue is proportionate to the saliency of a colour. That is why red, the most salient colour, is the first to be defined in terms of hue in any culture (eruthros in Greek), while green and blue are generally first perceived as brightness because they are less salient colours, and are slowly focused as hues later. This means that in some contexts the Greek adjective chloros should be translated as 'fresh' instead of 'green', or leukos as 'shining' rather than 'white'. The Greeks were perfectly able to perceive the blue tint, but were not particularly interested in describing the blue tone of sky or sea - at least not in the same way as we are, with our modern sensibility.
This model is helpful for describing the different ways in which a chromatic culture can segment the huge range of possible combinations of the three dimensions by privileging one or the other. A culture might emphasise hue or chroma or value, each with varying intensity. And so the Munsell model is useful in that it helps to demonstrate the remarkable Greek predilection for brightness, and the fact that the Greeks experienced colours in degrees of lightness and darkness rather than in terms of hue.
However, the Munsell model doesn't completely explain how the Greeks perceived colour since it leaves out the richness of the 'colour event' - the subjective, felt perspective of colour that Goethe so valued. For the Greeks, colour was a basic unit of information necessary to understanding the world, above all the social world. One's complexion was a major criterion of social identity, so much so that contrasting light women and dark men was a widespread cliché in Greek literature and iconography, rooted in the prejudice that the pale complexion of women is due to their living in the darkness of the domestic sphere, whereas men are tanned and strengthened by physical exertion and outdoor sports. So the Greek word chroa/chroiá means both the coloured surface of a thing and the colour itself, and is significantly related to chros, which means 'skin' and 'skin colour'. The emotional and ethical values of colour cannot be forgotten in trying to discern Greek chromatic culture.
Of use are two further parameters, in addition to the Munsell model and the subjective value of colour. There is the glitter effect of colour, which is produced by the interplay of the texture of the object and the light conditions, and there is the material or technological process by which a certain colour is obtained in the practice of painters and dyers. With these in hand, the full range of Greek colours will come into view - even the notorious 'curious case' of porphureos, the chromatic term most difficult to grasp.
Not only does porphureos not correspond to any definite hue, placed as it is on the borderline between red and blue (in Newtonian terms), but it is often applied to objects that do not appear straightforwardly 'purple', as in the case of the sea. (The fact that the sea can appear purple at sunset is not sufficient to explain the frequency of this epithet in Greek literature.) When the sea is called porphureos, what is described is a mix of brightness and movement, changing according to the light conditions at different hours of the day and with different weather, which was the aspect of the sea that most attracted Greek sensitivity. This is why Homer calls the sea 'winey', which alludes not so much to the wine tint of the water as to the shine of the liquid inside the cups used to drink out of at a symposium. As shown by the naval friezes and the aquatic animals painted inside many drinking vessels, vase painters turned the image around, so that the surface of the drink suggested the waving of the sea. Porphureos conveys this combination of brightness and movement - a chromatic term impossible to understand without considering the glimmer effect.
The material effect of shimmering under the light rays is well-caught by Aristotle within a discussion on the colours of the rainbow (one of them being violet). In his Meteorology, he states:
The same effect [as in the rainbow] can also be seen in dyes: for there is an indescribable difference in the appearance of the colours in woven and embroidered materials when they are differently arranged; for instance, purple is quite different on a white or a black background, and variations of light can make a similar difference. So embroiderers say they often make mistakes in their colours when they work by lamplight, picking out one colour in mistake for another.The luminous quality of purple textiles is due to the particular manufacturing of porphura, the material from which the dye was drawn. Purple dye was produced as early as 1200 BCE in Phoenicia from urine, sea water, and ink from the bladder of murex snails. To extract the snails, the shells were put in a vat where their putrefying bodies excreted a yellowish liquid that would be boiled (the verb porphurō means 'swirling' besides 'growing/dying purple'). Various nuances from yellow to green, to blue, to red could be obtained, depending on how much water was added and when the boiling process was stopped. The red and purple tones were greatly prized in antiquity because of the costliness of the process (one mollusc providing just a few drops of undiluted juice) and the colour did not easily fade - on the contrary, it became brighter with weathering and sunlight. This is why purple was associated throughout antiquity - and beyond - with power, prestige and glorious beauty, worn for centuries by Emperors and kings, cardinals and Popes.
So the curious case of porphura shows how the effects of movement, variation and luminosity went along with resonances of preciousness. (Gold was also appreciated for similar reasons, and it is not by chance that the heroes and gods from Homer to Philostratus are often attired in gold and porphura.) By moving beyond the Newtonian model, a clearer picture of the Greek chromatic world emerges. However, there is one lingering question about the Greek perception of colour: why, after all, did the Greeks value brightness so much? The philosophers that inspired Goethe offer a clue.
The first pre-Socratic philosopher to mention colour was Parmenides, who wrote in the fifth century BCE that 'changing place and altering in bright colour' are among the characteristics that mortals ascribe to reality, 'trusting them to be true'. Then came Empedocles, with a fragment that compares the mixing of the four elements that build the sensible world to the work that painters do when mixing different pigments in variable proportions:
As when painters decorate votive offerings -The effect of splendour was likely important to Empedocles' concept of colour, as he explained the production of all colours through the mixture of two elements, fire and water, which correspond respectively to white (light) and black (darkness), and are considered the two extremes in the chromatic continuum.
men through cunning well-taught in their skill -
who when they take the many-coloured pigments in their hands,
mixing in harmony more of these and less of those,
out of them they produce shapes similar to all things,
creating trees and men and women
and beasts and birds and fishes nurtured in water
and long-lived gods highest in honours
During the second half of the fifth century BCE, Democritus argued that the nature of colours depends on the interaction between visual rays, daylight and the atomic structure of objects. He considered brilliance to be a factor as important as hue for defining colours. Moreover, in explaining the various colours as mixtures of a basic set of four (white, black, red and green), or as mixtures of the primary mixtures, he considered the mixture of red and white (corresponding to the golden and copper-colour) plus a small amount of green (adding a sense of freshness and life) to give 'the most beautiful colour' (probably gold). He regarded purple as a particularly 'delightful' colour, on the grounds that it comes from white, black and red, the presence of white being indicated by its brilliance and luminosity. The same appreciation of brilliance is found in Plato, whose account of vision in Timaeus is centred on the interaction of three factors, namely: the fire internal to the observer's eye; daylight; and the 'flame' (that is, again, the light) transmitted by the coloured object. Plato's list of primary colours includes white, black, red and, most remarkably, the 'brilliant and shining', which to us is not a colour at all.
Aristotle differs from Plato on crucial points in metaphysics and psychology. Nevertheless, he shares Plato's predilection for brilliant colours. In On Sense and the Sensible, he devotes a chapter to colour where he argues that the various colours arise from different proportions in the mixtures of white and black. These last two, moreover, correspond in his view to the fire and the water in the physical bodies, and determine the transparent medium as light and darkness respectively. Red, purple, green and dark blue, kuanoun, are primary mixtures of white and black, the remaining colours resulting from mixtures of the primary ones. Purple, red and green are 'most pleasant' to the eye as they are endowed with a peculiar reflectivity, which is due to the neat proportion of light and darkness in their composition.
Aristotle elaborates on the aesthetic assumptions of his predecessors and makes explicit statements on colour being an indicator of vitality and vigour, both in the world and in painting (which recalls the need to take into account the emotional meaning of a colour). Indeed, Aristotle describes the embryo's development in his biological work On the Generation of Animals by an analogy with painting practice:
In the early stages [of the embryo's formation] the parts are all traced out in outline; later on, they get their various colours and softnesses and hardnesses, quite as if a painter were at work on them, the painter being nature. Painters, as we know, first of all outline the figure of the animal and after that go on to apply the colours.What is more visible in painting to Aristotle's eyes, so as to help to explain the embryo's growth, is how the pairing of line and colour works: first the drawing of an outline provides the essential features of an image, then comes colour to add 'flesh' and the beauty of life. It is most noteworthy that a similar attitude emerges from a number of ancient descriptions of the aesthetic effect produced by the colouring of statues, pervaded by the celebration of the brightening and enlivening properties of colour. For instance, the character of Helen in Euripides' tragedy, in complaining about the devastating events caused by her beauty, wishes for her colours to be erased from a statue, so as to eliminate her fatal charm. The literary evidence has recently received striking corroboration on this subject from important archaeological reconstructions of ancient sculptural polychromy. The effect sought by applying the most brilliant (and saturated) colours was exactly one of splendour, along with energy, movement and life.
So Goethe was right. In trying to see the world through Greek eyes, the Newtonian view is only somewhat useful. We need to supplement it with the Greeks' own colour theories, and to examine the way in which they actually tried to describe their world. Without this, the crucial role of light and brightness in their chromatic vision would be lost, as would any chance to make sense of the mobility and fluidity of their chromatic vocabulary. If we rely only on the mathematical abstractions of Newton's optics, it will be impossible to imagine what the Greeks saw when they stood on their shores, gazing out upon the porphureos sea stretching into the distant horizon.
About the Author
Maria Michela Sassi is professor of ancient philosophy at Pisa University. She has written a number of essays published in international journals on diverse topics in ancient thought, from pre-Socratic philosophy to Aristotle. She is the author of The Science of Man in Ancient Greece (2001).
Reader Comments
Ethiopians could not have had blond hair, since blond hair comes from defects of genes.
There were no defects of genes with the Ethiopian 'Gods'.
Please explain from whence came "from the shining blond hair of the gods".
Shalom
My sense is that what we have developed as consciousness was activated and structured by cosmic terrestrial events.
So while the emulation and ritual observances to a range of often catastrophic events took human form - including the god king - the original or archetype was associated with light that was also power of life and death. As noted by mediumfoot - we do not know that the qualities of light on Earth were the same or that our eye to mind and mind to eye consciousness was the same.
This answer to your query does not explore blonde hair in humans. I have read that some ancient Egyptians were blond and migrated north to found or mix with the Norse peoples.
Looking at humans, one could say that our genes are defective - in general. Is this a valid idea or are epigenetic factors 'painted' out in the patterns or sets of what is activated and what is left dormant? Is defective thinking a maladaptation to life as a creative extension - of word and vision - such as to be trapped under our own mispelling and misperception?
The experience of living until relatively recently was Mental and generally magically conceived. It still is Mental but through the spell of denying or controlling the magical-imagination in reduction to external 'objective' realities - defined by priesthoods and elites that to be officially designated 'real'.
The idea that we are merely subject to 'reality' is of course the assignment of power or god to externality - and the right or ability to change it,
The attempt to possess and control reality - or to be as a god - is both a driver of an alienated or segregative consciousness, and the establishing of the conditions of subjection.
The Law operates; as you give, so shall you receive. Such is simply the nature of Mind. But the 'consciousness' of the split mind is the idea of power over, and subjection under, and through the lens of this idea is the drive to get, and the fear of being gotten from or dispossessed of life.
Giving and receiving truly is of course our true and original nature - to be uncovered beneath the distortions or 'defects' of a mind at war with itself - that goes back to the 'War in heaven' and which humanity replicates from denials that are themselves denied.
Similar statements are made by Sitchin, and other folks who have been working on the Sumerian texts.
The concept of 'god' is just about 500 years old. The first humans were created Ethiopians, by Ethiopian gods. Historical fact. It had absolutely nothing to do with planets.
Shalom
The book "Stolen Legacy” by Prof. George G M James shows where so-called Greek philosophy was stolen Egyptian philosophy. “Greek philosophers” could mislead people into believing or thinking there was Greek philosophy.
Shalom
I'll rest here, for now.
Shalom.
By why should the ancient Greeks have had a significantly different set of priorities and expectations for their experience? It is circular reasoning to say that different ocular areas are stimulated, triggering different emotional responses, and producing cultural contexts that stimulate different ocular areas. There is no accounting for cause in this explanation, and therefore no real understanding of why the ancient Greeks were so different from ourselves (in many more ways than just their perception of color.)
It is necessary to conceive of a developmental model of human consciousness in order to escape circular reasoning. The ancient Greeks, and all ancient cultures, experienced the world and themselves fundamentally differently from how we do it. They only slowly developed a sense of themselves as separate, bounded, creatures, but rather experienced themselves as vehicles for the activities of the Gods, and phenomena as revelation as well. Aristotle wasn't writing to be a logician, but to begin to be able to think about the revelation he witnessed.
By understanding our human past, we can start to get an idea of where we are heading in terms of consciousness. We have lost the direct experience of the spiritual world in order to become more independent of it. Now we must learn that the physical world is made up of phenomena, not matter. Science is learning this, and is leading the way to a future in which we develop a conscious understanding of the spiritual truths that lay hidden behind the sense-perceptible phenomena around us.
Perhaps a 'model' or construct that filters the 'spiritual' so as to seem something else - like separate minds in separate bodies - each in their own 'bubble reality' and collective cultural or group bubbles.
The thinking that supports and maintains its bubble is not a framework into which to stuff the qualities of any true (directly shared) relationship.
I see a value in recognising the bubble (ego) rather than living as if it is who and what Is - and the past conditioning is the archetype of the personality structure. In this sense a catastrophic past caused a collapse, contraction and fragmentation of 'consciousness' or rather, denial.
We see this usually as a Fall or a punishment for sins or a loss - from the perspective of the bubble-think. That generated exoteric religion. So then we deny all of that and see ourselves as somehow evolving from slime as a sort of biological automaton - as a further layer of denial of creative imagination - BECAUSE it has polarised in a negative or lack and fear defined body of belief.
Science as science - rather than as technology of defining in order to control life - undoes the false to reveal the true. We cannot in Fact stand outside the 'spiritual' to study it or control it, but we can be moved within its field in resonant thought and act - and this is how we share coherent meaning rather than conflict in dissonance and the attempt to control or contain chaos.
The true nature of the 'spiritual' is timeless - and so repeating the past is part of our experience of linear time - as a face or self-imaged condition within object permanence. What is inconceivable to the bubble adapted mind is that what is inside is identical or one with what is outside. "When thine eye be single, thy whole body be full of light". This is not speaking to a mind IN a body but rather to the music THROUGH the instrument.
The wish and a-tempt to control the light, blocks its communication through us, and the belief we have in some sense killed the light is the guilt that then becomes afraid of truth and must needs hide in fig-leaf thinking to persist/survive in a sense of a now private or separate sense of self-existing - set against world and other as rival or threat. hence the vengeful 'god' we both hide from and hide in, alignment with emulating a coercive nature we project onto it, (power, compliance and conformity) and of course sacrifice partially to appease or mitigate feared and expected outcomes (war and sacrifice) - so as to delay the 'inevitable' exposure or reckoning with truth. (death or loss of self protective control).
As I see it - there is a total breakdown of communication between that which is founded on denial, and that which shares itself because such is the nature of love's being (Creation), and only a stirring of love's being in the recognition and acceptance (instead of denial and rejection) can 'incubate' a consciousness born of a desire for truth - in place of the 'self-getting mechanism'.
But the replacement of madness with sanity, is not destructive - excepting in the interpretation of investment in guilt and fear as a means to get something we want - and thus protect against being undone to a healed or whole perspective. And hence the ongoing curiosity to the appearance/experience of being 'stuck' in old patterns - rather than emotionally driven reactions of fight or flight, physical or psychic.
Who controls the present controls (projects such control) the past - as a construct of support for the posture of presentation. And thus ensures a future like the past. Don't look for 'Big Brother' outside our own continuity manager or narrative controller.
The 'we' or any presumption is likewise a GIFT of extension. To extend the gift of life is an inclusion and sharing of worth. We are expressions of the Living One. To 'share' a sense of lack and unworthiness is to deny the Living One in another and deprive ourself of a true reflection or meeting. Garbage in, garbage out.
Forgive me extending this reply to such a generality of inclusion, but it is in the spirit of giving or teaching what I choose to learn - instead of setting problems in terms that divert from the cause so as to keep as forever engaged in conflicts as real in and of themselves. Context is a kind of zooming out for greater perspective and stillness is the zero point in which all is exactly as it is - as the balanced embrace of all that is. Thus anything but 'zero' and within all appearance of motion and relation.
That's an important question! There is something else to experience, right? Otherwise, the choices would be spiritual reality or a complete lack of experience of any kind. The modern lower ego is a response mechanism. It's a created construct that begins to function at about age 3 and enables us to function in this sensory experience. That ego separates, categorizes, labels, judges - all functions that tend to obscure spiritual experience from our conscious awareness. Our three options are to reject the phenomenal world as spiritless, and therefore completely illusory and wrong (making of it an enemy), become completely immersed in materializing the phenomenal world as if it were the cause of itself (making it heroic), or finding a balance point within which to find spiritual purpose in our current experience. I believe that is what Christ came to join himself with a physical body to do. He had to experience physical death and demonstrate that death can be conquered in order to show us the way forward.
We have this limited experience for a reason. It's not helpful or enlightening to reject it as 'wrong' or 'illusory', but rather to try to discover why it is necessary for our further development, and thus why adversarial forces are allowed to bring us the challenges that they do. The study of how and why this experience in phenomena is necessary, and how to avoid the trap of spiritual death through materialism, is a compelling one for me.
There is no 'they'... we each send the the signal out to attract an opportunity for self-uncovering.
Second, When “Ancient” “Greeks” translated Momir/Homer under the rule of Pizistratos(who wasn’t Greek)one of the “translators” was caught in the act of “beautifying” “the Iliad” and was expelled for 10 years.
Can this Lady explain ancient Latin notices how ancient”Greeks” falsified most of historical record.
Most blatant example: “the Iliad” happened ~1200 BC, first historic record of Greeks ~700BC.
Or "what do I get from attending and engaging in the useless"?.
Confusion is a defence or strategy by which to block or NOT know what is otherwise evident or imminent or indeed Immanent.
Sufficient unto the day be the evils thereof - means that where past patterns are intruding or blocking your function (usefulness) or joy (fulfilment) is the point of readiness to revision it.
You notice the ability to say one thing and yet do another. This is because there is a hidden belief that is triggered to act in terms of what is actually perceived and believed in that moment that is out of accord with what you say you want to believe and act from.
Curiosity can go directly to the point that guilt will frame in terms of maintaining a masking defence or a 'new set of Emperor's clothes'. Can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put Humpty together again? But are you truly fragmented, broken, denied, rejected, abandoned betrayed and blah? We have such experience and in general are driven by it and adapted to 'live' within it... or ELSE! - In other words fear-thinking structures a mind that tries to recoil or lid over what it seeks to escape. But 'wherever you go, there you are' and we bring with us all the baggage of our past and project it onto Presence - (whatever that would be should we open to be known). We all see unowned shadows in each OTHER. Is it a perpetual motion machine? Or is there a power to undo hate, grievance and vengeance - whether self inflicted or mitigated by outsourcing toxic debts to others or to our World-Body?
Binra, we get the experience of figuring oursleves out and with any discernment, ditch the outworn automated mechanisms.
I answered your first question (afterwhich i enjoy kinda lullabye frequency... not sleep, sweet n gentle vibes - not hitting on you either beautiful sentences do that to me.)
Greece was civilized by Egypt, and the Ethiopians who ruled Egypt. Established historical fact.
The Greek gods were Ethiopians. Greek's philosophy, is stolen Egyptian philosophy.
Read the book "Stolen legacy" by Prof George G M James, who mysteriously died almost immediately after publishing his book.
Shalom
Cant say i comprehend much of what you both write but it does feel like poetry to me.
We in fact no longer can have Any Idea how our vision is supposed to be. Artificial lights, mirrored lenses.... Etc.
Humanity the tragic joke.