What colour

[astondog]

What colour was the sky in Ancient Greece

[MrsCheeks]

the same colour as the sky in Modern Greece!!

[Mortartube]

This was on QI last night. Bronze

[jenstar]

Of course, the question and answer were totally ******* stupid. The point was that the ancient greeks didn't really differentiate between colours like we do and so lots of different colours were all called the same thing, in this case bronze. But let's face it - it WAS blue, and it's the ancient greeks, rather than Alan Davies, who got it wrong, no matter what that smug git Stephen Fry might say.

[woofgang]

well you could argue that the sky now isn't blue, it only looks blue from where we are looking at it

[Peter Pedant]

Jenstar is 'almost' right. The colours in Ancient greek may have encompassed different parts of the spectrum. For example Homer refers to rosy-fingered dawn, but the word he uses is porphyrodactylos, and porphyro is more purple. He also refers to wine dark sea, and ugh wine is never sea coloured. So this boils down to what word did he use for the sky? Not sure. Words may differ in meaning over time. Red meant more brown over the last centuries. I bet you wondered why we never see Red Cows nowadays - the name of so many pubs - and of course the reason is red cows were always brown. Hardy mentions that early purple orchids were nicknamed soldiers coats in the early nineteenth century. The orchids are definitiely purple and we know that soldiers' coats were red, and I hav never worked this out. Shakespeare's word for the blue of sky was welkin by the way. More on different cultures' different view of the spectrum in Trevor Roper's Through Blunted Sight (1965)