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b'Were ancients color-blind? They weren\\u2019t but this idea has been passed around for centuries, usually by classicists confused by the Greeks\\u2019 odd choice of descriptive language. Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the first \\u2018great\\u2019 poet of western civilization described the sea as o\\xeenops, or \\u2018wine-dark\\u2019.
Today\\u2019s guest is David Wharton, editor and contributor to \\u201cA Cultural History of Color in Antiquity,\\u201d is here to disabuse those ideas of the ancient world. Some prominent, recent research on Latin color language asserts that the ancient Romans mostly lacked abstract color concepts, instead conceiving of \\u201ccolor\\u201d as intimately connected with the material substances that Latin color terms typically referred to. Not only that the Romans were fully capable of forming and expressing abstract color concepts, but also that they expressed relationships among these concepts using structured metaphors of location and motion in an abstract color space.

We also discuss how would a resident from the ancient world would view color differently from a modern person, techniques for color creation in the past, and how color was utilized iin such things as conspicuous consumption, sartorial purposes, and class distinction.'