Actually, no!
Blue was the color of the sea and the sky and purple was something quite apart from that.
Purple was a very important color to ancient Greeks. Very expensive...so much so it was affordable only to royalty and the very wealthy!
The very fact that the color purple signifies royalty today is due to its importance in ancient Greece.
Tyrian purple, mentioned in texts dating about 1600 BC, produced from the mucus of the hypobranchial gland of various species of marine molluscs, notably Murex, was literally worth its weight in silver.
Durable dyes for clothing were not abundant.
Dyes were most likely poor and not extremely durable.
Archaeologists have concluded that brilliant color was, because of the difficulty of its achievement, an element of status and wealth.
Color was quite important in ancient Greece and the language of the time, like any language of a complex people, was in no way crude and was clearly expressive of what was felt and sensed.
As important as color was and a descriptive as the language was, there are still some curious points of difference in the way the ancient Greeks perceived color.
Here is a link to a site sponsor by Bryn Mawr College on this subject...Ancient Greek Color Vision.
Here is an interest quote from that site (note that the comment on linguistic relativity--to come back to your mention of language--indicates that language is limited to what one is conscious of perceiving and experiencing) [emphasis added]...
This correlation between Homer and other Ancient Greeks on the subject of color vision suggests some questions about Ancient Greek color vision leading to ideas inquiring into the ability of the Ancient Greek eye to perceive color at all.It is possible, in light of evolutionary theory, that the retina of the Ancient Greek was not evolved to the point of full color perception. Different mammals have varying degrees of color vision and eyes are especially prone to mutation. But besides this evolutionary question there is the question of consciousness, the question of the brain and language in relation to color perception.
This color vision particularity could have been caused by a lack of visual consciousness that would lead to the creation of new words that were needed to explain a visual phenomenon. This inability to perceive something because of linguistic restriction is called linguistic relativity (7).
Because the Ancient Greeks were not really conscious of seeing, and did not have the words to describe what they unconsciously saw, they simply did not see the full spectrum of color, they were limited by linguistic relativity.
Julian Jaynes (Princeton psychologist/lecturer/scientist, died 1997) concluded from an extensive study of ancient texts (including the works of Homer, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Bible) that ancient man was not conscious the way modern man is.
Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind posits that man wasn't conscious at all until about 3,000 years ago and that the development of human consciousness can be traced quite clearly in ancient literature/texts/codices. [Also see the Julian Jaynes Society site for more discussion of this matter].
Here's a review of Jaynes work (there are many others at the Jaynes Society site)...
"Neuroimaging techniques of today have illuminated and confirmed the importance of Jaynes' hypothesis." − Robert Olin, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus in Preventive Medicine [Karolinska Institute, Sweden], in Lancet.