The word rendered in English as ‘turned,’ however, does not refer to ‘turning’ with a lathe, as the earlier commentators followed by the translators supposed, but to such helical designs as Mycenæan artwork exemplifies to superfluity. And it was in the same style that Odysseus beautified his couch at Ithaca—the couch wrought of a still rooted olive tree. He reminds his queen, as yet dubious of his identity, how
Thence beginning, I the bed did mould
Shapely and perfect, and the whole inlaid
With ivory and silver and rich gold.[[419]]
[419]. Ib. xxiii. 199-200 (Worsley’s trans.).
The chest of Cypselus must have been an analogous piece of work, though more highly elaborated; and the ‘beds of ivory,’ denounced by the Prophet with the rest of the ostentatious luxury in which Jerusalem attempted to vie with haughty Tyre, may have displayed similar ornamental designs. In the Homeric palace of Menelaus, an ideal of splendour exotic in the West, but fitting in naturally with Oriental surroundings, was sought to be realised. Some such model doubtless floated before the eyes of the poet as the house of Ahab, magnificent with panellings of that loveliest of organic substances bartered by the ‘men of Dedan’ for the finely-wrought bronze, the purple-dyed and embroidered cloths of Phœnicia. Domus Indo dente nitescit.
The door of deceptive dreams imagined by Penelope, may possibly, on the other hand, have had a Mycenæan prototype.
Two diverse gates there are of bodiless dreams,
These of sawn ivory, and those of horn.
Such dreams as issue where the ivory gleams