At the burial of Cæsar we are told that, among the tokens of grief exhibited by the Romans, the matrons burned on his funeral pyre their personal ornaments, the robes and even the rings of their sons.
‘The Greeks and Romans,’ observes Mr. Fairholt, ‘literally revelled in rings of all styles and sizes. Nothing can be more beautiful in design and exquisite in finish than Greek jewellery; and the custom of decorating their dead with the most valued of these ornaments has furnished modern museums with an abundance of fine specimens.’
The two rings next represented are copied from originals found in the more modern Etruscan sepulchres, and are probably contemporary with the earliest days of the Roman Empire.
In one of these rings the hoop is not perfected, each extremity ending in a broad, leaf-shaped ornament, most delicately banded with threads of beaded and twisted wire, acting as a brace upon the finger.
Gold rings from Etruscan sepulchres.
Lord Braybrooke purchased in 1849 a Roman gold finger-ring, set with an intaglio in ribbon onyx, which was found in a Roman stone coffin at York: subject, a Fortuna Redux. In the same collection is a very curious and massive gold mourning-ring formed of two knotted withes twisted together; the knots are hollowed to receive enamel. The inscription inside the hoop is, in old English characters: ‘When ye loke on thys, thyncke on hym who gave ye thys.’ This ring was found in the Thames at Westminster.
Ring found at Amiens.
In the Londesborough Collection is the representation of a ring found upon the hand of a lady’s skeleton, who was buried with her child in a sarcophagus discovered in 1846 in a field near Amiens, called ‘Le Camp de César;’ on two of her fingers were rings, one of which was set with ten round pearls, the other, represented in the collection mentioned, is of gold, in which is set a red cornelian, engraved with a rude representation of Jupiter riding on the goat Amalthea. The child also wore a ring, with an engraved stone. The whole of the decorations for the person found in this tomb proclaim themselves late Roman work, probably of the time of Diocletian.