The section of the book that has received the most mainstream attention is Gladstone's analysis of Homeric language related to colours.

Gladstone raises the issue that the colours Homer attributed to many natural objects feel strange to modern readers.

Many readers, however, have read Gladstone's explanation of Homer's colour terms as a suggestion that he and the other ancient Greeks were colourblind.

[2] The most controversial line is his claim that "the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age."

Gladstone denied that he suggested here the Greeks suffered from colourblindness, though, and he later said: "My meaning was substantially this: that he [Homer] operated, in the main, upon a quantitative scale, with white and black, or light and dark, for its opposite extremities, instead of the qualitative scale opened by the diversities of colour."