 One of Marty’s early works (Marty 1879) is concerned with a problem that differs from the ones he treats in his other writings. In the work under consideration he addresses the question whether the usage of color names in ancient Greek literature, especially Homer, provides us with reasons to assume that human color perception has evolved in the last couple of thousand years. Homer sometimes clearly uses one and the same color term for very different colors and sometimes describes colors of everyday objects in a way which is surprisingly incompatible with our contemporary color descriptions. The description of the color of the sea as “wine dark” and many other such instances in Homer, as has had been pointed out (Gladstone 1858, vol. III, 457 ff.), can be taken as a strong indication that the ancient Greeks perceived colors in a way that differs from our color perception. Some of Marty’s contemporaries thought that this is not only the case (Wenning 1990), but also that the evidence suggested that the evolution of color perception starts with dark and bright and proceeds through the color spectrum. This would mean that the ancient Greeks could see red and perhaps yellow, though probably not green, blue, and violet. On the basis of the physiological work of Ewald Hering on color perception (Hering 1878), Marty argued that such a development could not take place. For it was a result of Hering’s work that the perception of red and green was the result of the same neural system and that of the perception of blue and yellow was the result of a distinct one. Blindness to red consequently goes together with blindness to green, as does blindness to blue with blindness to yellow. Moreover, Marty argues from various data, most notably ancient paintings, that the ancient Greeks perceived all the colors that we do. However, if ancient Greeks perceived the same colors as we do, how do we explain the great difference between Homer’s and our usage of color terms? Marty gives various reasons, but two seem to be specially important. Firstly, Marty insists that the proponents of the evolution of color perception fail to distinguish between color sensation and judgments in which colors are classified. They also forget to take into account that language is primarily a means for communication, not a tool for isolated theoretical descriptions. When people feel no special need to communicate about certain colors, they feel no need to classify them with special terms. One term can therefore cover a wider area of color sensations (Marty 1879, 97 ff., see also Funke 1924, 14). Secondly, Marty brings the poetic function of language and its poetic inner form into focus (Marty 1879, 78–94). The main goal of Homer’s poetry was not to communicate exact observations, but to evoke powerful and aesthetically pleasing presentations with the help of metaphor and metonymy. This leads to a surprising and unusual poetic use of color terms employed in comparisons and presentation through relations. The fact that Marty elaborates on such distinctions is of particular significance because it already exemplifies how Brentanian descriptive psychology was being applied in his early work. This was of course to be done more elaborately and systematically in his later writings, especially his main work (Marty 1908a).