The meaning of the word Scaurus is “club-footed,” and no doubt the first member of the family had that peculiar formation of the foot; but this family was a branch of the great Gens Æmilia, one member of that family built the Basilica Æmilia in the Forum Romanum, and another was one of the second Triumvirate. The Scaurus who built this great amphitheatre was a man of enormous wealth, and a great builder; he is mentioned by several of his contemporaries, of whom one was Cicero; he was an ædile, and was noted for his great liberality in his ædileship. His father was an orator, and was consul in the year of Rome 688 (B.C. 35); his mother, when a widow, married Sylla the dictator. Pliny mentions him several times in his Natural History[237]; he calls his buildings _insane_ works, on account of the enormous sum expended upon them, which must have exceeded the equivalent of two millions sterling of our money. The temporary amphitheatre which he built would hold 80,000 persons, it was three storeys high, and had 360 marble columns in it; these were on the ground-floor, and it is mentioned that those on the first floor were of glass[238], a luxury before unheard of (and apparently not repeated), on the upper storey they were of gilt wood. Pliny thus describes this building of Scaurus:— “Mosaic pavements were first introduced in the time of Sylla; at all events, there is still in existence a pavement[239], formed of small segments, which he ordered to be laid down in the Temple of Fortune, at Præneste. Since his time, these mosaics have left the ground for the arched roofs of houses, and they are now made of glass. This, however, is but a recent invention; for there can be no doubt that, when Agrippa ordered the earthenware walls of the hot baths, in the thermæ which he was building at Rome, to be painted in encaustic, and had the other parts coated with pargetting, he would have had the arches decorated with mosaic in glass, if the use of them had been known; or, at all events, if from the walls of the theatre of Scaurus, where it figured, as already stated, glass had by that time come to be used for the arched roofs of apartments. It will be as well, therefore, to give some account also of glass[240].”