242 ROMAN PAVEMENTS. 



privilege that any freedman possessed, of claiming mouldy 

 grain on the production of his trumpery ticket, his tesserula.* 

 Tickets or "tesserae theatrales" were used for giving admission 

 to the games of the circus or amphitheatre, and though usually 

 of wood, they were sometimes of red ware, and were marked or 

 stamped with numbers indicating the position of the seat to 

 which the holder was entitled. 



The word was further used to denote the large square patterns 

 sometimes woven into the pallium, for Pliny observes that 

 Zeuxis, a celebrated painter, became so rich and ostentatious 

 that on the very tesserae, on the square tartans of his cloaks, he 

 had his name embroidered in letters of gold.f But squares or 

 tesserae of this size were too large to give their name to a chequer- 

 board, and Juvenal uses the diminutive tessella when he exclaims, 

 as proof of his poverty, " I possess not a scrap of ivory ; neither 

 my tessellae, my playing board, nor my men are of this material.''! 

 We incidentally get some idea of the size connoted by this 

 diminutive, the tessella, since Pliny in his Book on Cultivated 

 trees speaks of grafting and says that a scutcheon of the bark 

 must be remembered, " exempta scutula cortici," of which Cato 

 had described the very dimensions. The scutcheon when taken 

 off by the knife should be four fingers in length [Cato says 3^] 

 and three in breadth [or about 3 inches by 2 inches] ; and then, 

 a few lines farther on, in describing a similar process, he uses 

 the word tessella instead of scutula, " exempta cortice tessella." 



But he must have thought the word appropriate to small 

 squares, for in his account of the mineral androdamas, he says it 



* Scabiosum tesserula far possidet ; 



Pers. Sat. V., 74. 



f Opes quoque tantas acquisivit, ut in ostentatione earum, Olympiae aureis 

 literis in palliorum tesseris intextum nomen suum ostentarit. Plin. XXXV., 9. 



J Adeo nulla uncia nobis 

 Est eboris, nee tessellse nee calculus ex hac 

 Materia. Jw.Sat. XI., 131. 



Cortices scalpro excidi quatuor digitorum longitudine et trium latitudine. 

 Plin. XVII., 16. 



