Transcript

HELEN KING

Hello, I’m Helen King. And I’m Professor of Classical Studies at The Open University. And I’m joined today by John Harrison who’s an applied psychologist and also a PhD student in the Department of Classics here. Thanks very much for coming, John.

JOHN HARRISON

Pleasure. Thank you, Helen.

HELEN KING

So today we’re thinking about vision, and we’re trying to think about how the ancient Greeks and Romans thought about sight but also about how modern knowledge of sight helps us with that. And I want to start with one of the most, to me, weird images from the ancient world, a very famous one, Homer’s epithet for the sea, the wine-dark sea. What on earth is that about? How can the sea be the colour of wine?

JOHN HARRISON

Yes, that’s something I’ve agonised over, too. And I think anybody that’s encountered it must’ve thought that’s a very curious reference. And I suppose there’s a variety of possibilities.

One of the things I always reach for quite early on is some metaphorical use of language. And something that comes up a lot is often synesthetic thought is usually just metaphor. So symphonies are black, and Keats is purple. And I wondered if maybe that was one of the reasons why the sea might be wine-dark.

HELEN KING

So can you just unpack that a bit? How would that work? What does synesthesia mean?

JOHN HARRISON

Hmm. So synesthesia is a union of sensation literally. And the individuals that we’ve worked with in the past tend to have a coloured hearing variance. There are other combinations.

HELEN KING

So they hear something, and they hear it as red?

JOHN HARRISON

Yeah. It’s one of those interestingly ineffable experiences, I think. So one of the revelations from synesthetes is that they’ve always assumed that everybody had this. And it’s only at some point in their life where they said, I have a teacher Mr. Brown, but that’s wrong because he’s green. And their parents look at them oddly or one of their friends, and then they explain that when they hear certain words, they see certain colours.

HELEN KING

And is that a genuine phenomenon throughout human history? Are people always going to be, some of them, hearing in colours?

JOHN HARRISON

Yeah, I think we can make that assumption. I suspect that humans have changed very little in the last two millennia. There is some evidence that synesthesia is an inherited condition. And I think we might reasonably assume that's always been the case.

HELEN KING

So if Homer says the sea is wine-dark, he’s actually thinking the sea is in some way like wine?

JOHN HARRISON

Yes. I think that might be either at a semantic level or a perceptual level. I mean, one of the things we are not sure of, I suppose, is quite what colour the wine he was thinking about might actually have been. And if it was a typical colour for Greek wine of that time, then I would suspect that it was a reasonable metaphor to pitch. But I suspect there are other explanations, too. And at the very extreme, maybe Homer, in spite of being the blind poet, might have had some colour deficiencies if he did have any kind of vision.

HELEN KING

So could Homer have been colorblind in our terms?

JOHN HARRISON

I think it’s a possibility, yes. I mean, if you’ve got a form of colorblindness where you’re having trouble picking up green, I think a red-colored wine might look a sort of yellowish-brown. And that seems to me consistent with the idea of what the sea might look like.

HELEN KING

So we thought a bit about synesthesia and mixing up the senses. And we thought a bit about colorblindness as a diagnosis potentially. What other explanations have people come up with for this wine-dark sea image?

JOHN HARRISON

Well, it might be related to the use of language also. So colour and its colour term use across different languages varies very substantially. I think in English we sort of have 11 principal colour terms, but there’s very good evidence that other languages tend to focus on a much more reduced level of language terms. And I think if you’re talking about something being dark, and this is one of the analogies that we have from language is you could say that it’s dark like a leaf. So that’s implying a sense of greenness but also a sense of darkness, too.

HELEN KING

So you wouldn’t take seriously any of the more empirical explanations, that by the time the Greeks had watered down their wine, it would have ended up looking more greenish?

JOHN HARRISON

Well, I think we’re spoilt for choice here, aren’t we? We have such a number of hypotheses to pursue, and any of them might be reasonable.

HELEN KING

Or perhaps just on a really stormy day it looked very dark.

JOHN HARRISON

I suppose ultimately the colour of the sea is a reflection largely of what’s above it. So, yes, that’s distinctly possible, isn’t it?

HELEN KING

So we’ve got loads of explanations for wine-dark sea. Can I just ask you about one other colour term which always baffles me, and that’s chloros, which tends to be translated green? But we have this very famous poem by Sappho in which she describes the symptoms when she suffers from love and how she goes all sort of hot and sweaty and clammy, and her ears hum, and her heart’s racing and so on. And she says that she’s more chloros, more green, more whatever, than grass. What’s going on with that one?

JOHN HARRISON

I think we’re necessarily in the area of speculation. But I think there are, again, analogous situations. So I think of Keats as a good example. So for Keats, the colour of passion is purple.

HELEN KING

Oh, OK.

JOHN HARRISON

And he talks about-- Porphyro has the idea of sneaking into Madeline’s chamber to watch her undress on the eve of St. Agnes. And the thought creates purple riot in his heart, which is always one of the lines I love from it. But I think also it seems to me the same sense that I’m getting from Sappho when she talks about the sensation of being in love. And I wonder if her use of chloros in the context of that situation is a legacy of that heightened state of arousal that she finds herself in when she’s in love.

HELEN KING

That’s interesting because chloros can also mean sort of dewy fresh colour, sort of spring I suppose, anything to do with newness and just freshness and sap rising and all those sorts of things. So it could fit in with what you’re saying there about that heightened arousal. Everything looks fresh in some way. That’s really interesting.

JOHN HARRISON

I think the case of synesthesia is interesting because it’s-- in neuroscience, you usually learn a lot more about normal human behaviour when you look at extreme cases, the people that have a supra level of performance and people that have some sort of level of impairment. And the impairment’s always very interesting in the context of our understanding of vision. But I think synesthesia is a good focus for saying something that we know about everybody, the idea that your senses interact. So the interaction of sensation has some very unpredictable, but some very interesting, interactions.

HELEN KING

Thank you very much for that, John. I hadn’t realised that we still don’t really understand an awful lot about perception and particularly how the brain sees colour. So that’s been really useful. Thank you.