Note 185 — Chapter XX · STATE OF SOCIETY AND MANNERS AS EXHIBITED IN GRECIAN LEGEND.

Ivory is frequently mentioned in Homer, who uses the word ἐλέφας exclusively to mean that substance, not to signify the animal.

The art of dyeing, especially with the various shades of purple, was in after-ages one of the special excellences of the Phœnicians: yet Homer, where he alludes in a simile to dyeing or staining, introduces a Mæonian or Karian woman as the performer of the process, not a Phœnician (Iliad, iv. 141).

What the electrum named in the Homeric poems really is cannot be positively determined. The word in antiquity meant two different things: 1, amber; 2, an impure gold, containing as much as one-fifth or more of silver (Pliny, H. N. xxxiii. 4). The passages in which we read the word in the Odyssey do not positively exclude either of these meanings; but they present to us electrum so much in juxtaposition with gold and silver each separately, that perhaps the second meaning is more probable than the first. Herodotus understands it to mean amber (iii. 115): Sophoklês, on the contrary, employs it to designate a metal akin to gold (Antigone, 1033).

See the dissertation of Buttmann, appended to his collection of essays called Mythologus, vol. ii. p. 337; also, Beckmann, History of Inventions, vol. iv. p. 12, Engl. Transl. “The ancients (observes the latter) used as a peculiar metal a mixture of gold and silver, because they were not acquainted with the art of separating them, and gave it the name of electrum.” Dr. Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, vol. i. p. 241) thinks that the Homeric electrum is amber; on the contrary, Hüllmann thinks that it was a metallic substance (Handels, Geschichte der Griechen, pp. 63-81).

Beckmann doubts whether the oldest κασσίτερος of the Greeks was really tin: he rather thinks that it was “the stannum of the Romans, the werk of our smelting-houses,—that is, a mixture of lead, silver, and other accidental metals.” (Ibid. p. 20). The Greeks of Massalia procured tin from Britain, through Gaul, by the Seine, the Saone, and the Rhone (Diodôr. v. 22).