The Sea Was Never Blue Homer called the sea "wine-dark." He never once wrote the word blue. Not for the sea, not for the sky, not for anything. For a century, scholars assumed the Greeks were colorblind. They weren't. Their eyes worked exactly like ours. But their language carved the spectrum at different joints. They quantized color by brightness and texture, not by hue. Dark, gleaming, pale — these were the categories that mattered. Blue simply wasn't a boundary they drew.