It's true, but Homer's text is really quite secondary. Colour terms develop in language over time. Some languages only have terms for what you might call black, white and red. Some also add green, while some dont add green but add yellow. The languages I work with typically are only black, white, red and green, but actually it'd be better to translate that as dark, light, warm and cool. Yellow, in all of the varieties in the group I work with, when it exists, is a borrowing, and a very recent one at that. None of them have blue with any sort of consistency.

Anyway, there are a few important things to address here. The first is the idea of Basic Colour Terms. These are words like red, blue, purple, but not words like lavender, puce, goldenrod. They are the most fundamental colour terms, and ones that either cannot be derived from other items (e.g. lavender) or can but are no longer immediately associated as meaning "the colour of that thing" (e.g. orange).

English is generally described as having 11. Russian gets another since "azure" and "blue" are distinct. Many global languages have something around that 11 number. But a lot of languages did and do have far fewer.

The next idea that needs to be addressed is the idea of the development of these terms. For this there was the idea proposed in the 1960s by Berlin & Kay, two linguists working on the topic, of a hierarchy of terms. The super brief summary is this:

If a language only has 2 words for basic colours, they will be "black" or "dark" and "white" or "light". If there are three basic colour terms in a language, the third will be "red". Four terms adds either "green" or "yellow", and five terms adds the other that didn't get added at four. Other colours happen later on, like "orange" and "blue" and "brown". "Grey" is kinda a wild card (as per more recent work done by Kay, but not addressed in the original publications).

In cases where you have black white red and green, what this really means is dark light warm and cool. Thus blue and green are the same term because they are both cool colours. In those cases shades of what you'd call yellow in English are classified as shades of "warm" or "cool" depending on how close to red and green they get.

The reason that these are the colours that happen first as languages develop these systems is that, for a word to be a basic colour term, it needs to meet a certain set of criteria. First it has to be not made up of other terms. Before English has "orange" it had "yellowred". This isn't basic because it can be divided into component parts. "Sky blue" fails for the same reason.

Next it has to not be named for something else, or not be considered by the average speaker to be named for something else. Chartreuse is named for a kind of drink, so that's disqualified.

Then finally it has to be psychologically salient. That is, speakers have to have no trouble with the association. Red means red and you know it means red and you don't confuse it for meaning "warm", symbolism aside.

For the basic colour term systems to expand, what is required is there to be cultural significance to these terms. Lets say you only have 4 colours but a larger more powerful culture conquered yours, and now all your people are bilingual. In the language of the conqueror you have a word for yellow that you don't have in you language. Kids growing up learning the conqueror's language in school will notice this discrepancy and within a generation a word for yellow will be introduced into the language of the conquered. This is what's happening with the groups I work with, for whom the 90 year old speakers have no word for it, but the 20 year old speakers do and are generally unaware that their elders don't. In the case of "blue", if you think about it blue isn't really a common colour outside of synthetic dyes. What around you is blue? The sky is the obvious answer, or the ocean. But the ocean is more green and just reflecting the sky's blueness, so it's not hard ot see how one might call the ocean green or black or something else, unless you're hanging out in Bondi. The sky then, but actually the sky will not generally be identified as blue in these contexts. Why? Because it's not a thing. You can't hold the sky, or touch it or interact with it. A lot of cultures call it white if they call it anything, because it's bright. Even in modern Mandarin when we talk about daytime we cay "white sky" 白天. The sky is blue in English because we're told it's blue growing up. I don't mean that it's not blue. I just mean that your immediate intuitive identification of the sky as a blue thing is culturally conditioned, and if you didn't have a reason to consider blue a culturally significant colour term, the sky can just as easily be white (which remember really means "bright" in simpler systems).

If you would like to know more, let me know.

There is always more to be said, but you may be interested in the answer by /u/sketchydavid to this previous question:

According to an episode of Radiolab, the word "blue" doesn't appear in any of Homer's works, or contemporary works in many other languages. Is this true? If so, when did the color blue start being recognized with its own word?