Name every stone
Each tale lists the ancient works it draws on, so you can follow a detail back to where it was first set.
The workshop
Why we lay myths in tesserae
We are an editorial workshop that retells Greek myths the way Roman-era mosaicists made floors: piece by piece, with the joins left visible.
Why tesserae
A Roman mosaic is made of thousands of small stones, each almost meaningless on its own. Set side by side, with grout between them, they become a lion, a hero, a sea full of fish. Greek myth works the same way. No single ancient author tells the whole story of Heracles or Medea; the tale has to be assembled from a line of Homer here, a chorus of Euripides there, a handbook entry, a traveller’s note, a painted cup.
We started Tessera Tales to do that assembling in the open. Each tale is laid from identifiable pieces, and we want you to see where one source ends and the next begins, the way you can see the grout lines on a floor.
How we read the sources
We work from the ancient texts themselves, in reliable editions and translations, and we compare versions before we settle on any detail. When Hesiod and Apollodorus disagree about a monster’s mother, we say so instead of quietly choosing one. When a story is told only by a late writer, we name the writer and the period.
Passages set as quotations are our own renderings, kept close to the original but written fresh for this site. Book and line numbers appear only where we are confident of them, and folk traditions are credited to the travellers and folklorists who recorded them.
The floor as a way of telling
Mosaicists had to make decisions that poets could avoid: how many heads to give the Hydra when the panel is small, which moment of a labour to freeze, which beast goes in the border and which hero in the centre. Those choices have shaped how people pictured the myths for two thousand years, so our tales often stop to look at temple sculpture, painted pottery and floors, not only at texts.
That is also why the site is arranged in panels. Hero tales, monster tales and later folk beliefs sit side by side, and the Bestiary gathers the creatures that so often prowled the edges of ancient floors.
About the pictures
The illustrations are new images made for this site in the manner of an ancient floor mosaic: small tiles, dark outlines, earthy teal, ochre and terracotta. They are not photographs of real mosaics and should not be cited as evidence of what ancient artists made. When a tale discusses a real object, we describe it in words and tell you where it is kept.
Show the joins
Where sources disagree, we lay the versions side by side rather than smoothing them into one.
Respect the living layer
Folk beliefs are described as traditions held by real communities, with care and without mockery.
Invent nothing
No made-up quotations, no imaginary scholars, no ruins that never existed. When we are unsure, we say so.
We read the ancient authors in standard editions alongside published translations; every passage marked “our rendering” is a fresh translation made for this site, not a copied one.
Spotted a cracked tile?
Tell us which myth you would like us to lay next, or which detail we set crooked. Every note that reaches the workshop is read by the editors.
Write to the workshop