He believed that although Homer represented the origins of western literature and had very sophisticated ideas about characterisation and tragedy and plot and genre, that in fact his colour vocabulary was comparable to that of a contemporary infant of about three years old,' says Bradley.
This established the idea that Homeric Greeks had defective colour vision and that perhaps were colour blind en masse. It's been a hotly debated scholarly topic for over a hundred years. Bradley says that one of the problems with what Gladstone and subsequent scholars did was to attempt to map ancient Greek colour terms onto how we understand colour. That is, the idea of a spectrum of abstract colours that we've inherited from Newton, where we can close our eyes and picture yellow and orange and red and blue.
'If you start to approach colour in a very different way and think of it as a different phenomenon, this really helps to understand what's going on with ancient uses of colour,' he says.