Fly without fate, and turn our hopes to scorn.
But dreams which issue through the burnished horn,
What man soe’er beholds them on his bed,
These work with virtue, and of truth are born.[[420]]
It has been conjectured that the imperfect transparency of laminæ, whether of horn or ivory, caused those materials to be associated with the shadowy forms of dreamland; but the apportionment of their respective offices was plainly determined by a play of words unintelligible except in the original Greek.[[421]] And it must be admitted that scarcely a worse pair of puns could be produced from the whole of Shakespeare’s plays than those perpetrated by our ‘bonus Homerus’ in a passage replete, none the less, with poetical suggestions largely turned to account by his successors.
[420]. Odyssey, xix. 562-67 (Worsley’s trans.).
[421]. See Hayman’s Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 361.
It is scarcely likely that complete tusks ever found their way to archaic Greece, yet the comparison—used twice in the Odyssey—of purely white objects to ‘fresh-cut ivory,’ decidedly proves a working acquaintance with the material. Its creamy tint was, in Egypt and Assyria, constantly set off by skilful intermixture with ebony; but ebony formed no part of the Homeric stock-in-trade.
One cannot but be struck by finding that, in the Iliad, ivory is employed only for embellishing equine accoutrements, but in the Odyssey, only for purposes of domestic decoration. So far as it goes, this circumstance tends to reinforce the contrast of sentiment towards the horse apparent in the two poems. Thus, a species of art practised, we are given to understand, exclusively by foreigners, helps to conjure up more vividly the effect of the rush of crimson blood over the white skin of the fair-haired Menelaus: ‘As when some woman of Maionia or Karia staineth ivory with purple to make a cheek-piece for horses, and it is laid up in the treasure-chamber, though many a horseman prayeth to wear it; but it is laid up to be a king’s boast, alike an adornment for his horse, and a glory for his charioteer.’[[422]] And the simile was adopted by Virgil to expound a blush.
[422]. Iliad, iv. 141-45.