The earliest passage of any Greek writer, in which the word is certainly used for the metal, is in the Antigone of Sophocles (1038), where mention is made of Indian gold, and the electrum of Sardis, as objects of the highest value. For the discussion of other passages, in which the meaning is more doubtful, see the Lexicons of Liddell and Scott, and Seiler and Jacobitz, and especially Buttmann's Mythologus, Supp. I. In Hesiod's description of the shield of Hercules ( V.141), the word again occurs, and we have gypsum, and white ivory, and electrum, connected with shining gold and cyanus, where amber is the more natural interpretation although here again, the Roman imitator, Virgil, evidently understood by it the metal XXXIII.4 s23) but his authority on the meaning of a passage of Homer is worthless: b and indeed the Latin writers seem generally to have understood the word in the sense of the metal, rather than of amber, for which they have another word, succinum. In this last passage, Pliny understood the word to mean the metallic electrum
Now, since the metallic electrum was a mixture of gold with a small portion of silver, the enumeration of it, as distinct from gold and silver would seem almost superfluous also, the supposition that it means amber agrees very well with the subsequent mention of ivory: moreover, the order of the words supports this view for, applying to them the principle of parallelism, - which is so common in early poets, and among the rest in Homer, - and remembering that the Homeric line is really a distich divided at the caesura, we have gold and amber very aptly contrasted with silver and ivory: The other passage is in the description of the palace of Menelaus, which is said to be ornamented with the brilliancy of copper (or bronze) and gold, and electrum, and silver, and ivory ( Od. In the former passage the necklace is brought by a Phoenician merchant.
The word occurs three times in Homer in two cases where mention is made of a necklace of gold, bound, or held together, ἡλέκτροισιν, where the plural is almost alone sufficient to prove that the meaning is, with amber beads ( Od. XXXVII.2 s11: Buttmann's derivation from ἔλκω, to draw, is objectionable both on philological and historical grounds: the attractive power of amber, when rubbed, is said, and no doubt correctly, to have been discovered long after the mineral was first known.) I p237: this derivation was known to Pliny, Etymologically, the word is probably connected with ἡλέκτωρ, the sun, the root-meaning being brilliant. If, as we shall endeavour to show, those passages refer to amber, a simple explanation of the twofold used of the word suggests itself namely, that the word originally meant amber, and that it was afterwards applied to the mixed metal, because its pale yellow colour resembled that of amber. If we could determine which was first known to the Greeks, the mineral or the metal, the subject would be simplified but the only means we have of determining this question is the slight internal evidence of a few passages in Homer. In the former sense, it does not come within the scope of this work, except as a substance used in the arts, and also on account of the difficulty of deciding, with respect to several of the passages in which the word occurs, in which of the two senses it is used. ( ἤλεκτρος and ἤλεκτρον), is used by the ancient writers in two different senses, either for amber a or for a mixture of metals composed of gold and silver. Article by Philip Smith, B.A., of the University of LondonĪ Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, John Murray, London, 1875.
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