Buxum
πύξος
Buxum (πύξος) properly means the wood of the box tree, but was given as a name to many things made of this wood. The tablets used for writing on, and covered with wax (tabulae ceratae), were usually made of this wood. Hence we read in Propertius (3.22, 8), Vulgari buxo sordida cera fuit.
These tabellae were sometimes called cerata buxa. In the same way the Greek πυξίον, πυξίδιον, formed from πύξος, box-wood,
came to be applied to any tablets, whether they were made of this wood or any other substance; in which sense the word occurs in the Septuagint (τὰ πυξία τὰ λίθινα, Exod. 24.12; compare Is. 30.8; Hab. 2.2). Tops were made of box-wood (volubile buxum, Verg. A. 7.382; Pers. 3.51); also all wind instruments, especially the flute (Ov. Pont. 1.1, 45, Met. 12.158, Fast. 6.697; Verg. A. 9.619); combs (whence Juv. 14.194, speaks of caput intactum buxo), and boxes (Luc. Asin. 14). [W. S.]
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.