The ancient Greeks and Romans barely valued blue at all

Pastoureau opens with a genuinely surprising fact: contrary to any assumption that blue's appeal is universal or timeless, ancient Greek and Roman societies gave the color remarkably little social or symbolic weight, rarely naming it precisely and almost never celebrating it in art or dress. Homer's famous description of the sea as "wine-dark" rather than blue is one small clue among many that ancient color vocabulary and priorities differed sharply from modern ones.

Worse than mere indifference, Romans specifically associated blue with the Celtic and Germanic peoples they considered barbarians, who used a plant called woad to dye themselves blue before battle and ritual, reinforcing blue's association with the foreign, uncivilized, and threatening rather than anything admirable.

This opening fact sets up Pastoureau's larger argument that no color carries a fixed, universal appeal across history — even blue's current dominance had to be built from a starting point of near-total cultural indifference or outright disdain.

Takeaway: today's "obviously" appealing color was, for over a thousand years of Western history, associated mainly with barbarism and the underworld.