Bradley takes a different view. The important point for him is that Homer describes the sea as wine-dark following a tragedy. Odysseus mourns the death of his men after a shipwreck, when they’ve been swallowed up by the wine-dark sea. Achilles mourns the death of Patroclus looking out on the wine-dark sea. 'The idea is that the sea is dangerous, it's captivating, it's intoxicating, just like wine', he says. 'It's much more than just the colour, it's more about what the object-metaphor is encouraging us to think about'.
Did the Romans as well as the ancient Greeks have this 'synaesthetic' way of understanding colour? An example Bradley cites that affirms this is the meaning contained in the word we simply translate as purple. 'In antiquity when something was porphura or purpura it would describe the dye which was extracted from sea-snails.' This dye was very expensive, it glistened and refracted light and was used for the garments of the rich and powerful. It also stank. 'One of the overpowering aspects of purple was it smelled really, really bad,' says Bradley.
The fishy smell stayed in imperial robes and senatorial togas, and so the word purpura carries both visual and auditory meaning. 'It's an example of how actually what we would see as a straightforward visual colour purple is in fact in ancient eyes something that is inherently synaesthetic.'