The present article investigates uses and functions of the bed motif in Homer’s ‚Odyssey‘ as well as its reception in literary texts from Ovid to Kluge. Many of the erotic episodes of the ‚Odyssey‘ have played a formative part in the shaping of the motif of the bed of love. In the story of Ulysses’ bed, however, we encounter a semantic figuration that transcends the function of a mere motif. In particular, the philosophical receptions of the story, the readings by Hegel as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, bring to the fore aesthetic and epistemological aspects of the bed narrative which draw attention to the poetological dimension of the motif.