Upon his bloody finger he doth wear
A precious ring, that lightens all the hole,
Which, like a taper in some monument,
Doth shine upon the dead man’s earthy cheeks,
And shows the rugged entrails of this pit:
So pale did shine the moon on Pyramus,
When he by night lay bath’d in human blood.
I may mention the employment of rings for criminal purposes, such as their use for concealing poison, of which we have instances in past ages, and in late times. Hannibal, we are told, from a fear of being delivered up to the Romans by Prusius, King of Bithynia, swallowed poison, which, to be prepared for the worst, he carried with him in the hollow of a ring. To this Juvenal alludes in his Tenth Satire:—
Nor swords, nor spears, nor stones from engines hurl’d,
Shall quell the man whose frown alarm’d the world;
The vengeance due to Cannæ’s fatal field,
And floods of human gore—a ring shall yield.
Demosthenes is also said to have died in a similar manner. The keeper of the Roman treasures, after the robbery by Crassus of the gold deposited there by Camillus, broke the stone of his ring in his mouth, in which poison was concealed, and immediately expired.
‘The ancients,’ remarks the Rev. C. W. King (‘Antique Gems’), ‘were acquainted with vegetable poisons, as speedy in their effects as the modern strychnine, as appears in the death of Britannicus from a potion prepared by Locusta, and in innumerable other instances. These hollow rings were put together with a degree of skill far beyond that of our modern jewellers; for the soldering of the numerous joinings of the gold plates of which they are formed is absolutely imperceptible even when breathed upon—a test under which the best modern solder always assumes a lighter tint.’
Motley, in his ‘Rise of the Dutch Republic,’ relates that in the conspiracies against the life of the Prince of Orange (about 1582), under the influence of the court of Spain, the young Lamoral Egmont, in return for the kindness shown to him by the Prince, attempted to destroy him at his own table by means of poison which he kept concealed in a ring. Sainte Philip de Marnix, Lord of Aldegonde, was to have been taken off in the same way; and a hollow ring filled with poison was said to have been found in Egmont’s lodgings. The young noble was imprisoned, and his guilt was undoubted, but he owed his escape from death to the Prince of Orange.
Poison ring.
A poison ring of curious construction is described by Mr. Fairholt as richly engraved, and set with two rubies and a pyramidal diamond; the collet securing the latter stone opens with a spring, and exhibits a somewhat large receptacle for such virulent poisons as were concocted by Italian chemists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
