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The meaning of the names of Greek-Roman collyria is often confusing. Indeed, these names are generally neologisms known to us through a single handwritten or epigraphic occurrence. However, there is no doubt that several of these names have been chosen for their for their commercial value, as “ambrosial”, “inimitable” or “invincible”. Did the names of collyria evoking colours have the same value? By virtue of the principle of analogy that prevailed in ancient medical reasoning, were not green, white and yellow considered to be the active ingredients of certain ancient collyria?

The therapeutic methods of the Salernitan doctors were based on the “medicine of opposites”. From the end of the 11th century, thanks to the translations of Constantine the African, they have been enriched by a theoretical framework seeking to define more precisely the effect of the remedies. A graduated evaluation of the raw qualities (hot-cold-dry-wet) of the simple ingredients entering into the composition of pharmacological preparations is then set up. However, the works of the practice report prescriptions which seem to fall under another framework of reading, of the old tradition of an “analogical medicine” in which a relation is established between the name, the aspect, the color of a cure and those of the disease to be treated. This article tries to see how these two approaches overlap or not by studying some colored elements of the Salernitan pharmacopoeia.

Based on a survey references to colours in Greek hippiatrics text—especially in the Hippiatrica and in book 16 of the Geoponica—this paper examines the lexicon used by horse-doctors to designate colour and the contexts in which it appears, in order to better understand the importance given to colour terms. Colour adjectives are used in three sections of the texts : the external description of the animal (especially the coat and eyes), body fluids and pharmacology (simple and compound drugs).

If colour is one of the observation criteria taken into account by the Egyptian doctor within the medical diagnosis, its role in the choice of materia medica is more difficult to estimate. The situation is quite different in the field of magic. Considering the role of colour in therapeutic and prophylactic practices, this contribution distinguishes between different aspects : colour understood as brightness and light, colour as a material, and colour as a classificatory tool.

Mesopotamian medicine offers a rich set of data related to the subject of colour, noted not only in diagnosis, but also in therapy. This contribution addresses the question of chromatic associations between given curative elements and symptomatologies, despite the methodological problems related to this line of research. A selection of health problems characterized by clear nuances has been presented : on the one hand, bodily fluids, such as blood and pus ; on the other, cutaneous ailments, for which cuneiform sources provided us with descriptions. The results reveal shared beliefs about the colour of certain ingredients, but also principles of chromoanalogy, similia similibus curantur, as well as their opposites.

According to some researchers, a narrow meaning of the adjective χλωρός, polysemous in both early and classical Greek literature, is observable already in the Hippocratic corpus. We would like to show that this adjective did acquired a narrower meaning in the medical literature, but much later, since our earliest extant evidence does not go beyond the 1st century A.D.

The subject of this paper is the link between jaundice and birds, according to the bond between the yellow colour and jaundice. For Ancient people, origin of the Greek name of this illness, ikteros, is the one of the kite (iktinos), whose eyes are yellow and black like those of the patient, or the one of a bile-coloured animal, perhaps the ikteros. Two birds, the ikterus and the charadrius, not well identified, are the only animals, known to us, which are prescribed in a method for transferring the jaundice, i.e the staring of yellow colour by the patient. Investigation about these points and on likely identifications for the two birds shows that many less or more yellow birds can be used against jaundice and that importance of the glance of the bird in the staring therapy is probably the origin of the ancient etymological explanations.

Minerals, or “stones” in the wide sense, are associated to herbal and animal substances to form the corpus of medicinal simples. Sources about it are to be not only looked for in the textbooks of medicine and pharmacology, but also in the treaties of alchemy and in lapidaries which draw from local or foreign traditions sometimes marked by superstitions, magical practices and legendary stories and have medicines of various origins as references. The study concerned some remarkable gemstones. One wondered about the influence of old concepts on medical thought and about the possibility that the medicinal virtues attributed to stones are related to their color, transparency or brilliance in accordance with the famous doctrine of signatures also known for plants and various parts of animals. We tried to answer this question by grouping together the gemstones under study according to their dominant color and comparing their medical virtues described in Arabic medical texts.

Considered as signum of poisoning by treatises on poisons written in Western Late Medieval Europe, colour takes also place among the skills that help preserving from poisoning because some stones are seen as able to reveal the presence of poison by changing or losing its colour when they are put on table, near-by plates or glasses. From several specialized texts and books of natural philosophy, this paper aims to know how the authors explained chromatic changes of stones in front of poison, if they believed in it and if their advices were heard and followed in late medieval courts.

Does the colour of salt play a part in its medical properties ? The effects of salt were well-known by the Ancients who considered it as a desiccating and antiseptic product, but have they a link with its chalky colour ? These are questions the paper intends to explore. Salt dries, burns, disinfects, is used as a painkiller and an anti-inflammatory drug, all qualities that are possibly reinforced by the properties of light foods, considered as purgative and haemostatic. Colour and trait combine to confer on the salt many virtues.

Why, with Homer and the rest of preclassical literature, does the sea display a great many colours (black, white, grey, purple, crimson), and can never be blue? The answer to that question is not to be searched in any problem of visual deficiency, but rather in the nature of the look which the Greeks of archaic times cast on sea space. Approaching the philological issue by means of historical anthropology, we then discover that the apparent inconsistencies and oddities of the Greek chromatic lexicon do then vanish. The article then tries to show that the analysis of the representations of the maritime chromatism in archaic literature enables us to throw off-center our outlook and to highlight the nature of the feelings aroused by the almightiness of the sea in collective Greek imagination.