Ancient ingenuity for throwing its favourite gamma into other combinations, and thus bringing forth other pretty but graceful patterns to be wrought on all sorts of ecclesiastical appliances, did not stop here. In the “Liber Pontificalis” of Anastasius, we meet not unfrequently with such passages as these: “Cortinas miræ magnitudinis de palliis stauracin seu quadrapolis;”[170] “vela ... ex palliis quadrapolis seu stauracin;”[171] “vela de octapolo.”[172] The explanation of these two terms, “de quadrapolo,” “de octapolo,” has hitherto baffled all commentators of the text through their forgetfulness of comparing together the things themselves and the written description of them. In these texts there is evidently meant a strong contrast between a something amounting to four, and to eight, in or upon these textiles. It cannot be to say that one fabric was woven with four, the other with eight threads: had that been so meant, then the fact would have been announced by words constructed like “examitus,” p. xxxvii. As the contrast is not in the texture, it must then be searched for in the pattern of these two stuffs. Sure enough, there we find it, as “de quadrapolis” and “stauracin” were, as we see above, interchangeable terms; the first, like the second sort of textile, was figured with crosses. Given at the end of Du Cange’s “Glossary” is an engraving of a work of Greek art, plate IX. Here St. John Chrysostom stands between St. Nicholas and St. Basil. All three are arrayed in their liturgical garments, which being figured with crosses, are of the textile called of old “stauracin;” but a marked difference in the way in which the crosses are put is discernible. As a metropolitan St. John wears the saccos upon which the crosses are arranged thus [Illustration] St. Nicholas, and St. Basil have chasubles which, though worked all over with crosses, made, as on St. John’s saccos, with gammas, are surrounded with other gammas joined so as to edge in the crosses, thus [Illustration] As four gammas only are necessary to form all the crosses upon St. John’s vestment, therein we behold the textile called by Anastasius, “Stauracin de quadruplo,” or the stuff figured with a cross of four (gammas); while as eight of these Greek letters are required for the pattern on the chasubles, we have in them an example of the other “stauracin de octaplo,” or “octapulo,” a fabric with a pattern composed of eight gammas. But of all the shapes fashioned out of the repetition of the one same element, the Greek letter Γ, by far the most ancient, universal, and mystic, is that curious one particularized by many as the [169] Lib. Pontif. ii. 243. [170] Ib. ii. 196. [171] Ib. ii. 198. [172] Ib. ii. 209.