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The Greek vocabulary is extremely complex, and colors in Ancient Greek (especially in Homer & Pindar) often carry an extremely rich field of significations, using metaphor and metonymy. It seems primitive because it seems meaningless due to its complexity.
Xanthos, for example, would be translated as "yellow" when it in facts describes a golden shimmer and is thus used of rivers, blonde hair, gold, etc. Porphuros is translated as red, but Homer uses it for the rainbow: the Greek understanding of color is emotional and connotative.
Sappho uses "chloros", green, to describe her skin, the same way Pindar says "ioplokamos", violet-braided, of the Muses, and Homer speaks of "kuanos", blue, when describing hair, but "oinopis", wine-colored, when describing the sea.
Because their understanding of color is that of an extremely rich network of images, emotions and themes: "chloros" reminds one of the shiny, translucent nature of a plant, and thus can be used of a woman's skin even if it is not "green".
If we refuse to engage with a radically different understanding of perception such as that offered by Ancient Greece & expect to find nothing alien in the Greeks, we will always perceive their understanding of color as primitive when it is in fact in many ways richer than ours.
More on porphuros: being re-semantized through its use in royal and priestly clothing, the term had acquired by Homer's time a connotation of divinity & royalty, so that the dreadful rainbow, sent by the gods to warn of terrible things to come, could be described as "porphuros".
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