‘Meanwhile,’ it is said, ‘Odysseus went to the famous palace of Alcinous, and his heart was full of many thoughts as he stood there, or ever he had reached the threshold of bronze. For there was a gleam as it were of sun or moon through the high-roofed hall of great-hearted Alcinous. Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round them was a frieze of blue, and golden were the doors that closed in the good house. Silver were the doorposts that were set on the brazen threshold, and silver the lintel thereupon, and the hook of the door was of gold. And on either side stood golden hounds and silver, which Hephæstus wrought by his cunning, to guard the palace of great-hearted Alcinous, being free from death and age all their days.... Yea, and there were youths fashioned in gold, standing on firm-set bases, with flaming torches in their hands, giving light through the night to the feasters in the palace.’[382] Footnote 382: _Odyssey_, vii. 81-102. Both here, and at Sparta, besides perhaps some gilding of smaller surfaces with overlaid gold-leaf, the stone and woodwork of the houses can be understood to have been coated with metal plates—a mode of decoration usual in Mesopotamia from a very early date. Thus, the temple of Bel at Babylon had its walls covered with silver and ivory, while the shimmer of gold came from pavement and roof.[383] The fashion was adopted in Egypt, and spread to Asia Minor, perhaps through the conquests of Ramses II., who built at Abydos a temple to Osiris, plated with ‘silver-gold.’ It was diffused as well among the pre-Dorian Greeks. Both the so-called ‘Treasury of Minyas’ at Orchomenus, and the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ at Mycenæ, bear evident traces of having once been scale-plated with bronze, not, it is thought, uniformly, but in fixed patterns.[384] So, here again, archæological research supplies the most instructive gloss upon the Homeric text. Metallic incrustations lost their charm when tinted marbles and manifold draperies had become fully available; but a glint of their traditional splendour was introduced by Plato into his Atlantis, where the temple of Poseidon was lined interiorly with the semi-mythical ‘orichalcum’ (later identified with brass), dug up appropriately in great profusion from the soil of a fabulous island.[385] Footnote 383: Helbig, _op. cit._ p. 436. Footnote 384: Schuchhardt and Sellers, _op. cit._ p. 147. Footnote 385: _Critias_, 116; Jowett’s _Plato_, vol. iii. p. 697.