_Iliad_, xxiii. 560; cf. Leaf’s annotations, vols. i. p. 110; ii. 413. Now forth from her chamber came the wise Penelope, like Artemis or golden Aphrodite, and they set a chair for her hard by the fire, where she was wont to sit, a chair deftly turned and wrought with ivory and silver, which on a time the craftsman Icmalius had fashioned, and had joined thereto a footstool, that was part of the chair, whereon a great fleece was wont to be laid.[418] Footnote 418: _Odyssey_, xix. 53-59. 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] Footnote 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 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]