Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/59

 or patterned with a cross. Being one of the four same-shaped elements of the cross's figure, the part was significant of the whole. Being, too, the emblem of our corner-stone—our Lord, the gamma, or [Greek: G], was shown at one edge of the tunic on most of the apostles in ancient mosaics; wherein sometimes we find, in place of the gamma, our present capital H for the aspirate, with which for their symbolic purpose the early Christians chose to utter, if not, write the sacred name. This H is, however, only another combination of the four gammas in the cross. Whatsoever, therefore, whether of silver or of silk, was found to be marked in these or other ways of putting the gammas together, or with only a single one, such articles were called "gammadion," or "gammadiæ;" but as often the so-formed cross was designated as "gammaed," or "gammadia." St. Leo gave to the Church of S. Susanna, at Rome, an altar-frontal, upon which there were four of such crosses made of purple silk speckled with gold spots; "vestem de blatthin habentem tabulas chrysoclavas iiii cum gemmis ornatas, atque gammadias in ipsa veste chrysoclavas iiii.

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;" "vela ex palliis quadrapolis seu stauracin;" "vela de octapolo." 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