Black Eyes

 Near the end of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics there appears the passage

Further, if a man prospers or fails to prosper because he is the kind of man he his, just as a man sees poorly because he is blue-eyed, then not luck but nature is the cause.

(Translated by Anthony Kenny.)  Earlier in Chapter 2 of Book VIII, there is a reference to the superior eyesight of the black-eyed. This is not something I have heard of elsewhere. It is tempting to suspect that Aristotle had dark eyes. People used to suspect and perhaps still do that he had a snub nose, for more than once in his works he asserts that a snub nose is not a defect.

In Naples '44, Norman Lewis writes that in WW II the career of one who had finished a preliminary course in military intelligence was determined before the placement interview had officially begun: the blue-eyed got the demanding, interesting, and--to be fair--more dangerous assignments. The dark-eyed were sent off to be sergeants in Field Security. My stepmother (herself blue-eyed) once remarked that the heroes and heroines in Helen MacInnes's novels of suspense always had blue eyes; though I suppose that some of their opponents must have had blue eyes, given that they tended to be Germans or Russians.

I don't know where Aristotle would have placed my eye color on the range from black to blue. My driver's license calls them brown, the mirror suggests that hazel or green might suit better. (Be their color what it may, I don't see well without glasses.) The word Kenny renders as "blue" is "glaukos".  Liddell and Scott say that as applied to eyes this means blue or light blue--otherwise it seems to shade toward green.