“There are few public men in Europe”: John Stuart Blackie, reported in the
“statesman, orator, and scholar”: John Stuart Blackie,
“a little hobby-horsical”: Letter to the Duke of Argyll, May 28, 1863 (Tennyson 1897, 493).
“Mr. Gladstone may be a learned, enthusiastic”: John Stuart Blackie, reported in the
“characteristic of the inability of the English”: Marx, letter to Engels, Aug. 13, 1858.
“I find in the plot of the
page 28-29 Ilios, Wilusa, and the historical background of the
Leto “represents the Blessed Virgin”: Gladstone 1858, 2:178; see also 2:153.
Gladstone’s originality: Previous scholars, from as early as Scaliger in 1577, had commented about the paucity of color descriptions in ancient writers (see Skard 1946, 166), but no one before Gladstone understood that the differences between us and the ancients went beyond occasional divergences in taste and fashion. In the eighteenth century, for example, Friedrich Wilhelm Doering wrote (1788, 88) that “it is clear that in ancient times both Greeks and Romans could do without many names of colors, from which a later era was in no way able to abstain, once the tools of luxury had grown infinitely. For the austere simplicity of such unsophisticated men abhorred that great variety of colors used for garments and buildings, which in later times softer and more delicate men pursued with the greatest zeal.” (“Hoc autem primum satis constat antiquissimis temporibus cum graecos tum romanos multis colorum nominibus carere potuisse, quibus posterior aetas, luxuriae instumentis in infinitum auctis, nullo modo supersedere potuit. A multiplici enim et magna illa colorum in vestibus aedificiis et aliis operibus varietate, quam posthac summo studio sectati sunt molliores et delicatiores homines, abhorrebat austera rudium illorum hominum simplicitas.”) And in his
sea red because of algae: Maxwell-Stuart 1981, 10.
“blue and violet reflects”: Christol 2002, 36.
“if any man should say”: Blackie 1866, 417.
“a born Chancellor of the Exchequer”: “Mr. Gladstone’s Homeric studies,”
Violet iron:
no one can be insensitive to the appeal of the colors: Goethe,
“Homer had before him the most perfect example of blue”: Gladstone 1858, 3:483.
“As obliterating fire lights up”:
page 35 “their head aslant”:
“blackening beneath the ripple of the West Wind”:
“have been determined for us by Nature”: Gladstone 1858, 3:459.
“continued to be both faint and indefinite”: Gladstone 1858, 3:493.
“only after submitting the facts”: Gladstone 1877, 366.
“the organ of colour and its impressions”: Gladstone 1858, 3:488.
“the perceptions so easy and familiar to us”: Gladstone 1858, 3:496.
“The eye may require a familiarity”: Gladstone 1858, 3:488.
“The organ was given to Homer”: Gladstone 1877, 388.
Gladstone accurate and farsighted: On the modernity of Gladstone’s analysis, see also Lyons 1999.
2: A LONG-WAVE HERRING
Geiger’s lecture: “Ueber den Farbensinn der Urzeit und seine Entwickelung” (Geiger 1878).
Geiger’s bold original theories: Many of these ideas, such as the discussion of the independent changes of sound and meaning, which anticipate Saussure’s arbitrariness of the sign, or the systematic discussion of semantic developments from concrete to abstract, are found in Geiger 1868 and the posthumous Geiger 1872. See also Morpurgo Davies 1998, 176, for Geiger’s ideas on accent in Indo-European. For assessments of Geiger’s life and work, see Peschier 1871, Keller 1883, Rosenthal 1884.
Geiger’s curiosity piqued by Gladstone’s discoveries: It seems, however, that Geiger misread one aspect of Gladstone’s analysis, since he seems to think (1878, 50) that Gladstone believed in the legend of Homer’s blindness, whereas, as we have seen, Gladstone explicitly argued against this legend.
“These hymns, of more than ten thousand”: Geiger 1878, 47.
Biblical Hebrew does not have a word for “blue”: As various scholars from Delitzsch (1878, 260; 1898, 756) onward as well as Geiger himself (1872, 318) have pointed out, there is one cryptic remark in the Old Testament, in Exodus 24:10 (also echoes in Ezekiel 1:26), that seems, at least indirectly, to relate the sky to lapis lazuli. In Exodus 24, Moses, Aaron, and seventy of the elders of Israel climb up Mount Sinai to see Yahweh: “And then they saw the God of Israel. Beneath his feet was something like a mosaic pavement of lapis lazuli, and like the very essence of the heavens as regards purity.” There are two descriptions of the “pavement” beneath God’s feet here: this surface is first said to have the appearance of a pattern of bricks of lapis lazuli, and secondly it is said to be pure “like the very essence of the heavens.” The sky itself is not
pages 44-45 Geiger quotes: 1878, 49, 57, 58.
Geiger’s confusions about black and white: Geiger may have assumed that black and white should be considered colors only if they have separate names from dark and bright. This may explain his obscure (and apparently conflicting) statements about the position of white with respect to red. In his lecture (1878, 57) he says: “Wei ist in [den achten Rigvedalieder] von roth noch kaum gesondert.” But in the table of contents for the second (unfinished and posthumously published) volume of his
Tantalizing hints in Geiger’s own notes: In
