Gladstone noticed Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark,”
I KNEW IT
It's the fuckin Greek thing again.
Listen, I'll tell a story in three parts.
People started saying a few years ago that ancient Greeks didn't make a distinction between blue and red, because look at what Homer said, and the sea is obviously not wine colored. Or maybe they had blue wine? But anyway we think they thought they were the same color.
I always thought it was a bunch of shit. Blue and red are different. They're so clearly different that some people morphed the whole thing into a lack of distinction between blue and green, since that makes quite a bit more sense sense and there definitely are cultures that don't have different names for similar colors like blue and green that English has different words for. But anyway, the issue here was blue and red, and to me, I was always convinced that it was a bunch of shit.
And look - I WAS RIGHT. I was all ready to write up #1 and #2 in answer to your question and agreeing with you, but without the punchline, but just now I looked it up to be able to bitch about it a little more effectively, and learned that smart people have in the meantime figured out that the whole "wine dark sea" thing was talking about the sea being dark in brightness, like wine is dark, i.e. not light and clear and happy like the Mediterranean often is. But still colored blue presumably. So, not a bunch of surprising and confusing stuff about "blue=red" that sounds suspiciously like nonsense, but something that's perfectly sensible.
TL;DR you are correct. Blue is blue and always was. The people who are telling you blue and red used to be the same are probably just confused, and if Homer comes into the equation then that's a telltale sign that they are absolutely confused and you don't have to listen to them.