Helbig, _Atti dell’ Accad. dei Lincei_, t. i. p. 425.
Both in the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer shows perfect familiarity with ivory. But he is entirely unconscious of its source. No rumour of the elephant had reached him. He would surely, if it had, have shared the surprising intelligence with his hearers. In the judicious words of Pausanias,[412] he would never have passed by an elephant to discourse of cranes and pygmies. The _début_ in Europe of the strange great beast ensued, in point of fact, only upon the Indian campaign of Alexander. His tusks were, however, in prehistoric demand all through the East; and the relations of archaic Greeks were almost exclusively Oriental. Assyrian ivory-carvings enjoyed a just celebrity; the palaces of Nineveh and Babylon were softly splendid with the subdued lustre of their costly material. Solomon’s ivory throne, and Ahab’s ivory house exemplify its profuse availability in Palestine; Tyrian galleys were fitted with ivory-bound cross-benches; musical instruments were ivory-dight and wrought; ebony and ivory furniture made part of the tribute of Ethiopia to Egypt; and the spoils of Indian elephants were in demand in Italy before the Etruscans had penetrated the Cisalpine plain. Thus, gold, silver, amber, ivory, and coloured glass combined with beautiful effect in a kind of so-called ‘Tyrrhene’ ornaments, extant specimens of which have been taken from the Regulini-Galassi tomb, and other coeval repositories.[413] In Troy and Mycenæ, ivory was relatively plentiful. Pins and buckles were made of it, and perhaps the handles of knives and daggers.[414] Ivory plates, round and rectangular, and perforated, in some cases, for attachment to wood or leather, have been, in both spots, sifted out from surrounding _débris_, and may be imaginatively supposed to have once enriched the horse-trappings of Hector or one of the Pelopides. The art of carving in ivory, however, was in both these places in a rude stage, and appears unfamiliar to Homer. He barely recognises the use of the material in substantive constructions, while availing himself of it freely for veneering and inlaying. The only piece of solid ivory met with in the poems is the handle of the ‘key of bronze’ with which Penelope opened the upper chamber to take thence the fateful bow of Odysseus.[415] For the sheath of the silver-hilted dagger given to the Ithacan stranger by the Phæacian Euryalus,[416] was assuredly not _formed_ of ivory, although spirally decorated with it. This can be gathered from the re-application, in the Iliad, of the same phrase to designate the ornamentation with tin laid on in a curving pattern, of the cuirass of Asteropæus;[417] and it recurs, undoubtedly in a similar sense, in the following passage of the Odyssey: