Of flowers, butterflies and Roman dice

Snake's head fritillaries - including the white form, painted by Rachel McNaughton

It always annoyed me that a fritillary could be both a flower and a butterfly, but now I know where the name came from I feel much easier about it…

This week I took a picture of our often forgotten snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) in the garden.

Every year it’s the same. I almost pull it out because I think it’s just some self-seeded grass – in all honesty I would have, if it hadn’t been slightly out of my reach on a raised bed.

Snake's head fritillary in the garden this week...

Then suddenly it’s in flower, so delicate, its purple pattern so chequered. Clever, that. Although it looks better en masse in grass, as it is in Oxford’s Magdalen Meadows…

Fritillaries in great number at Magdalen Meadows, Oxford, pictured by Alison Ryde

Then there is the butterfly – in fact a whole bunch of fritillaries, in the family known as Nymphalidae, which includes nymphalids and browns as well as the fritillaries.

Marsh fritillary (Eurodryas aurinia) photographed by Brian Stone

You can tell the fritillaries because they have a chequered pattern and that’s the connection between flower and butterfly – the name comes from the Latin word fritillus, meaning a dice-box.

That must mean lots of differently-coloured dice all lined up together, row on row, but looking at the marsh fritillary I imagine a marquetry box like this…

Chequer-pattern marquetry box from Brazil

But of course that’s much too modern and more like a box for draughts (known as checkers in America) or chess.

I expect the Romans would have had a box made of ivory and full of dice that weren’t always six-sided and neatly cubed as ours are today, although they would still have made a pretty pattern.

Roman 14-sided dice

And the Romans were good at putting little pieces together to make a pattern, weren’t they?

A mosaic of Romans playing at dice, source unknown

Did the snake's head fritillary inspire the Croatian coat of arms?

Oh, and another thing… according to Wikipedia the snake’s head fritillary is the inspiration for the famous chequerboard pattern on the coat of arms of Croatia!

Advertisement