cellent one, as
both family honor and filial love could thus find expression. The
gifted, but dissolute Sylla, in the first design he had cut upon his
signet, sought to perpetuate the memory of his victory over Jugurtha in
107 b.c., the
Mauritanian king Bocchus being depicted in the act of surrendering
Jugurtha. Later on Sylla used a signet with three trophies, and finally
selected one with a portrait of Alexander the Great. For Lucullus, the
great gourmet and master of all the arts of Roman luxury, the head of
Ptolemy, King of Egypt, seemed the design best fitted for his signet.
The
two great rivals, Pompey and Cassar, chose widely divergent symbols.
The former wore a signet engraved with a lion bearing a sword, while on
Caesar's ring was cut an armed Venus, the Venus Victrix, from whom the
gens Julia claimed descent, and for whose statue Caesar is said to have
brought pearls from Britain to be set on the statue's breastplate. The
first choice made by Augustus was a sphinx, in symbolical allusion to
his taciturnity; later in his reign he wore a signet with Alexander the
Great's head engraved thereon, and finally, moved perhaps by the
flatteries of his adulators, he substituted his own image for that of
the great Macedonian. The famous literary patron of the Augustan Age,
Maecenas (d. 8 a.D.), who
was at the same time a very able statesman, chose the singular emblem
of a frog. That the blood-thirsty Nero should select a design figuring
a martyrdom seems very appropriate, and in the flaying of Marsyas by
Apollo cut on his ring, he undoubtedly identified himself with the sun
god and leader of the muses who took vengeance upon his would-be rival
in the musical art. For Nero was a most devoted amateur of the arts as
he understood them, and had sung—in a strained, high-pitched voice it
is said—in the
