Did the ancients see the same colours as us?

Did the ancients see the same colours as us?

One of the mysteries of consciousness is colour perception. For
example, science can never prove whether I experience exactly the
same thing as you when I see the colour red (for example). The
colours we can perceive are our brain's way of categorising
different frequencies of light that are within the range of our
eyes. However, if we could see a broader range of frequencies, no
doubt we could see new colours. Try to imagine that! It's very
difficult to imagine a totally new colour without just imagining a
different shade of a colour we already know. Probably the only way
we could do this is in a dream. Also, not all animals perceive as
many colours as us, some perceive more, and some only perceive
black and white, or none at all! Equally, some people are colour
blind, meaning that they are unable to distinguish between some
colours. Men are more likely than women to suffer from this, in
fact almost one in ten of the world's men (8%) are colour blind
(although men are more likely to be superior in other areas of
visual perception). It is thought that women probably evolved a
more exact ability to distinguish between different colour as
during the vast majority of our history, as hunter-gatherers, women
would have needed to be very careful about which fruits and berries
to pick, and a good ability to distinguish between different
colours is obviously of benefit in that.

However, to ask whether the ancients didn't see the same colours as
us may seem ridiculous. Yet things aren't quite as simple as they
seem when it comes to colour perception.

Whilst we may not be able to ever know whether another person
experiences the same thing as us when they look at the same colour,
to some extent we are able to investigate the subject with how
people describe colours. I'm sure you've had the experience of
calling something one colour, and someone else thinks it's another
colour. This is particularly common with colours that are similar,
such as blue and purple. Studies of the writings of the ancient
Greeks reveals that they didn't have words for pure blue or pure
yellow. Homer describes the 'blue hair of Agamemnon', when he means
black, and the 'wine red Aegean sea' when he means the blue sea.
Does this mean that the ancient Greeks saw colours differently? Or
perhaps it just means that they simply didn't have words for
particular colours, just as today some cultures have words for many
different variations of a colour that we lack in English. Yet, to
me, red is very different from blue, and black is very different
from blue. I can't see how anyone could confuse the two. And if
they simply lacked the words for blue and yellow, but could still
see them, why not invent words for them? If you can see a colour,
would you not want words to describe it?

Of course, our choice of particular words for colours defines how
we see them as separate, whereas in fact colours are not really
separate, discrete things, but points on a continuous spectrum of
light. Nevertheless, having words for a particular colour
undoubtedly draws our attention to it. An example of this is how in
the 19th Century people became aware of the colour Mauve - a form
of light purple. Surprisingly, before then this colour wasn't
recognised and we didn't have a word for it. That didn't come until
1856 when the Chemist William Henry Perkin coined the word, after
inventing an dye of this colour (called Mauveine). The colour
quickly spread as it was used in colouring clothes, and was highly
fashionable in the 1890s. It soon then became associated with
homosexuality, as a number of prominent homosexuals in the arts,
such as Oscar Wilde, took to wearing it. Interestingly, an example
of how our consciousness about colours shifts over time is that by
the 1950s Lavendar was then associated with homosexuality, and by
the 1970s, pink.

Ultimately we probably will never know for sure whether people in
the past saw colours differently, but with more research through
the historical archives we might be able to at least gain some more
insights and clues into this mysterious subject.