IN THE 1850s, the British scholar, politician and future prime minister William Gladstone proudly published a 1700-page work on the writings of Homer.
The opus ranged over Greek geography, society and morality, and it included a small but remarkable chapter on the use of colour in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Gladstone observed that Homer, whose powers of description and evocation were as exceptional then as they were hundreds of years before, was oddly non-exuberant when it came to colour.
The epic poet overwhelmingly described objects as either black or white, and when he mentioned an actual colour, like…
