When the Greek epic poet Homer (c. 800–750 BCE) calls the dawn ‘pink-fingered’ and the Greek poet Stesichorus (c. 630–555 BCE) describes a river as ‘silver-rooted’, it is tempting to read such phrases as literary ornamentation, as the decoration that typifies the epic style and which modern readers approach with a certain distance.

But that interpretation leaves out something essential. The epithet revealed what the object itself – dawn, the river – couldn’t show: the texture of perception itself.