La mer pourpre : façons grecques de voir en couleurs. Représentations littéraires du chromatisme marin à l’époque archaïque

Abstract

Why, with Homer and the rest of preclassical literature, does the sea display a great many colours (black, white, grey, purple, crimson), and can never be blue? The answer to that question is not to be searched in any problem of visual deficiency, but rather in the nature of the look which the Greeks of archaic times cast on sea space. Approaching the philological issue by means of historical anthropology, we then discover that the apparent inconsistencies and oddities of the Greek chromatic lexicon do then vanish. The article then tries to show that the analysis of the representations of the maritime chromatism in archaic literature enables us to throw off-center our outlook and to highlight the nature of the feelings aroused by the almightiness of the sea in collective Greek imagination.

Keywords

• colours
• sea
• crimson
• representations
• archaic Greece