To proceed, however, with the furniture. Though the principal value of many articles arose from the exquisite taste displayed in the design and workmanship, the materials themselves, too, were often extremely rare and costly. Porcelain, glass, crystal, ivory, amber,[382] gold, silver, and bronze, with numerous varieties of precious woods, were wrought up with inimitable taste and fancy into various articles of use or luxury. Among the decorations of the dining-room was the side-board, which, though sometimes of iron, was more frequently of carved wood, bronze, or wrought silver, ornamented with the heads of satyrs and oxen.[383] Their tables, in the Homeric age, were generally of wood, of variegated colours, finely polished, and with ornamented feet. Myrleanos, an obscure writer in Athenæus, imagines[384] they were round, that they might resemble the disc of the sun and moon; but from the passage in the Odyssey,[385] and the interpretation of Eustathius, they may be inferred to have been narrow parallelograms,[386] like our own dining-tables. The luxury of table-cloths being unknown, the wine spilled, &c., was cleansed away with sponges.[387] But the poet had witnessed a superior degree of magnificence, for he already, in the Odyssey,[388] makes mention of tables of silver. The poor were, of course, content with the commonest wood. But as civilisation proceeded, the tables of the wealthy became more and more costly in materials, and more elegant in form. ----- Footnote 382: On the attractive power of this substance, see Plat. Tim. t. vii. p. 118. Footnote 383: Athen. v. 45. Lys. Frag. 46. Orat. Att. t. ii. p. 647. Footnote 384: Deipnosoph. xi. 78. Footnote 385: α. 111. 138. Footnote 386: This is also the opinion of Potter, ii. 376, 377; and Damm. in v. τράπεζα, col. 1822. Footnote 387: Odyss. τ. 259. Pind. Olymp. i. 26. Footnote 388: κ. 354, seq. 361, seq. In the letters attributed to Plato we find mention made of silver tables. t. viii. p. 397. Sometimes, also, of brass. Athen. ix. 75. ----- It grew to be an object of commerce, to import from foreign countries the most curious kinds of wood,[389] to be wrought into tables, which originally supported on four legs, rested afterwards on three, fancifully formed, or on a pillar and claws of ivory, or silver, as with us. There was a celebrated species of table manufactured in the island of Rhenea;[390] the great, among the Persians, delighted in maple tables with ivory feet, and, in fact, the knotted maple appears at one time to have been regarded as the most rare and beautiful of woods.[391] But the rage for sumptuous articles of furniture of this kind did not reach its full height until Roman times, when a single table of citron wood (Gorgeous feasts On citron tables or Atlantic stone)[392]