morphosed them into poplars growing on the banks of the Eridanus (the modern river Po).10
In a lost tragedy of Sophocles, he saw the origin of amber in the tears
shed over the death of Melêager by certain Indian birds. For Nicias it
was the "juice" or essence of the brilliant
rays
of the setting sun, congealed in the sea and then cast up upon the
shore. A more prosaic explanation likened amber to resin, and
regarded it as being an exudation from the trunks of certain trees.
Indeed, the poetic fancy we have just noted is the same idea clothed in
a metaphorical or mythological form. Another fancy represented amber to be the solidified urine of the lynx, hence one of its names, lyncurius.11 The
brilliant and beautiful yellow of certain ambers and the fact that this
material was very easily worked served to make its use more general,
and it soon became a favorite object of trade and barter between the
peoples of the Baltic Coast and the more civilized peoples to the
10 Ovidii, " Metamorphoses," lib. ii, 11. 340 sqq. Some have proposed to read Redanus instead of Eridamus and have seen in the former name the designation of a stream flowing into the Vistula.
1111 Punii, " Naturalis Historia," lib. xxxvii, cap. 7.
