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Jewelry of the Ancients

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404:                      JEWELRY OF THE ANCIENTS.
ears, neck, necklaces, and fingers,1 the value of all which put together amounted to the sum of forty millions of sesterces (400,000Z.), a value which she was ready to attest by producing the receipts. Nor were these jewels the presents of a prodigal Emperor—they were regular family heirlooms ; that is to say, bought with the plunder of provinces. This was the end gained by his peculations, this the object for which M. Lollius made himself infamous all over the East by taking bribes from its princes, and at the last poisoned himself when C. Csesar, Augustus' adopted son, formally renounced his friendship—all for this end, that his granddaughter might show herself off by lamplight be­dizened to the value of forty millions of sesterces. Let any one now count up on the one side the sums carried in triumph by a Curius or a Fabricius, let him picture to himself their scanty display of spoils ; and on the other side, Lollia, a wretched female, a tyrant's plaything, seated at the feast ; would he not rather have seen them dragged down from the triumphal car, than to have conquered for an end like this ? "
A notice in Lampridius (Maximini Fil. Vitâ) gives us a curious peep into the trousseau of a Roman princess in the 3rd century : " Junia Fadilla, his betrothed bride, retained (after his murder) the imperial wedding-presents, viz.—Necklaces of single Pearls, nine ; hair-nets of Emeralds, eleven ; bracelets with clasps of true2 Hyacinths, four."
Caylus (vii. pi. 70) figures a necklace that gives a good notion of the style of Lollia's jewelry. It consists of fourteen short six-sided prisms of plasma, and six irregular pastes connected together by two gold links between each. The plasmas are one-third of an inch long, and very neatly cut. Amongst the finest specimens now extant, comes undoubtedly the one formerly in the Uzielli Collection (No. 637), composed of true-love-knots in gold, uniting large irregular Eubies and Emeralds (fine stones), each perforated at the ends. Lucian (Dial. Meret. vi.) makes the girl Corinna beg her mother to " buy her a gold necklace, having on it some fiery stones, like that of Philinnis." These people are of the lower class, these fiery stones therefore must have been common Garnets, of which abundance of beads are found shaped exactly as the plasmas above mentioned.
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