What the _electrum_ named in the Homeric poems really is cannot be positively determined. The word in antiquity meant two different things: 1, amber; 2, an impure gold, containing as much as one-fifth or more of silver (Pliny, H. N. xxxiii. 4). The passages in which we read the word in the Odyssey do not positively exclude either of these meanings; but they present to us electrum so much in juxtaposition with gold and silver each separately, that perhaps the second meaning is more probable than the first. Herodotus understands it to mean _amber_ (iii. 115): Sophoklês, on the contrary, employs it to designate a metal akin to gold (Antigone, 1033). See the dissertation of Buttmann, appended to his collection of essays called _Mythologus_, vol. ii. p. 337; also, Beckmann, History of Inventions, vol. iv. p. 12, Engl. Transl. “The ancients (observes the latter) used as a peculiar metal a mixture of gold and silver, because they were not acquainted with the art of separating them, and gave it the name of _electrum_.” Dr. Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, vol. i. p. 241) thinks that the Homeric _electrum_ is amber; on the contrary, Hüllmann thinks that it was a metallic substance (Handels, Geschichte der Griechen, pp. 63-81). Beckmann doubts whether the oldest κασσίτερος of the Greeks was really _tin_: he rather thinks that it was “the _stannum_ of the Romans, the _werk_ of our smelting-houses,—that is, a mixture of lead, silver, and other accidental metals.” (_Ibid._ p. 20). The Greeks of Massalia procured tin from Britain, through Gaul, by the Seine, the Saone, and the Rhone (Diodôr. v. 22).