I don't know if I buy it. The problem is that the people studying Homer seem to assume that he's being literal about his colors when he's decidedly NOT literal about other things, including sea monsters, cyclopses, trips to the underworld, sirens, an entire crew being turned to pigs, gods fighting in the war and getting injured. All kinds of weird visual images occurred in the Illiad and Oddesy. If you can make up a cyclops, how had is it to imagine a purple sheep, or a red ocean. And even then, this was poetry, which makes it even less likely that he means it when he talks about a blood Red Sea.
I don't know if I buy it. The problem is that the people studying Homer seem to assume that he's being literal about his colors when he's decidedly NOT literal about other things, including sea monsters, cyclopses, trips to the underworld, sirens, an entire crew being turned to pigs, gods fighting in the war and getting injured. All kinds of weird visual images occurred in the Illiad and Oddesy. If you can make up a cyclops, how had is it to imagine a purple sheep, or a red ocean. And even then, this was poetry, which makes it even less likely that he means it when he talks about a blood Red Sea.