The Earring That Survived Two Thousand Years

An Introduction to Ancient Jewelry

The object is small — barely three centimeters from the top of its hook to the bottom of the pendant. It weighs almost nothing. Hold it in your palm and you might forget it is there. But look at it closely: it is gold, hammered and shaped with a precision that seems impossible for hands working without the aid of modern tools. Hanging at the center of its intricate filigree disk is a delicate, winged figure — Eros, the god of love, rendered in miniature, suspended from the disk with his wings outstretched in a billowing cape.

This is one half of a pair of earrings now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Figure 1). The museum label tells you what they are made of and approximately when: “Pair of gold earrings with a disk and Eros, Greek, ca. 300 BCE.” It does not tell you who made them, or who wore them or what it meant when someone fastened one to their ear on an ordinary morning, two thousand and three hundred years ago.

Figure 1. Gold earrings with disk and boat-shaped pendant, Greek, ca. 300 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Jewelry Is Evidence for Life in Antiquity

History, as it is usually taught, is a tale of large forces: empires, battles, laws, economies. The figures who populate it are almost exclusively men with  power —emperors, generals, orators, philosophers. This is partly because of what the surviving texts record, and partly because that is what historians over time, most of whom were men themselves, chose to emphasize.

But there is another kind of evidence for historical knowledge. It does not arrive in prose. It does not explain itself. It sits in a vitrine under museum lighting and waits for someone to ask the right questions. It is jewelry.

But what can jewelry tell us that history books cannot?

A pair of earrings tells us about the metallurgical knowledge of its makers, the religious beliefs of its wearer, the trade and transportation networks that brought its raw materials from distant mines, and the aesthetic values of priorcultures. It tells us about women’s lives in ways that most ancient texts do not bother to record. It tells us about children, about ritual, about what people considered worth preserving when they prepared their dead for burial.

Three Dimensions of an Object

Jewelry can be read along three axes.

The first is material. Gold was not simply valuable — it was, as Pliny the Elder observed in his encyclopedic Natural History, believed to have inherent qualities that set it apart from other metals. It does not tarnish. It does not corrode. To ancient Greeks and Romans, this incorruptibility carried meaning: gold was appropriate for offerings to the gods, for objects placed in tombs, for adornment that aspired to permanence. How an object was made also matters. The filigree and granulation techniques visible on Hellenistic earrings, for example, required extraordinary skill (Figures 1 & 2). These were not mass-produced goods. They were hand-made by craftsmen who had trained for years, working with tools we would recognize as astonishingly refined.

The second axis is symbolic. Eros on an earring is not purely decorative. Eros was associated with desire, beauty, and, for the philosopher Empedocles, Eros was also the primal force that binds the world together. Wearing his image was a statement — perhaps of devotion to Aphrodite, perhaps of a young woman’s social identity, or perhaps of a wish for love.

The snake was another figure with symbolic meaning. Snakes, across the Hellenistic and Roman world carried apotropaic meaning: the serpent was a symbol of protection and rebirth, and wearing one on the wrist may have functioned as a kind of amulet. Gold diadems, meanwhile, placed on the heads of the dead echoed the crowns of gods and heroes, elevating the deceased in death to a status they may or may not have held in life.

Figure 2. Pair of gold earrings with a disk and Eros, Greek, ca. 300 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession no. 30.116.1, .2.

The third axis is social context. Homer’s Iliad offers some of the earliest literary evidence for jewelry’s social weight in the Greek world. When Hera prepares to seduce Zeus in Book XIV, she adorns herself with earrings and a veil, using her adornment as an instrument of power, with the help of Aphrodite [2]. Etruscan fibulae — the ornate pin-clasps that fastened garments — tell a different story. Some of the finest surviving examples, like the serpentine gold fibulae in the Metropolitan’s collection, display techniques (such as granulation in patterns of extraordinary density) that aid in identifying the workshop and period of production almost as precisely as a maker’s mark (Figures 3 & 4). As John Boardman has shown in his work on Greek gems and finger rings, the iconography of personal ornaments was rarely arbitrary — it expressed membership in particular religious, social, and professional communities [1].

Figure 3. Gold serpentine fibula (safety pin), Etruscan, ca. 7th century BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Figure 4. Gold sanguisuga-type fibula with granulation patterns, Etruscan, 7th century BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Why Jewelry Matters

Most ancient jewelry we have today was discovered in tombs. It survived because someone — a grieving family, a religious community, a person preparing for their own death — chose to adorn the deceased. This is worth pausing on. Every object in a museum was, at some point, part of a  decision about what the deceased ought to take with them into the afterlife. Adding jewelry to the deceased was therefore an act of belief, of love, of meaning-making.

These objects then survived the slow dissolution of empires, raiding and looting, and natural disasters before being excavated by archaeologists.. That they exist at all is improbable. That they are now in New York, or London, or Athens, accessible to anyone who walks through a museum door, is stranger still.

I study Latin and ancient history. In class, we read Cicero and Caesar, Virgil and Livy. These are extraordinary texts. But they were written by educated men for educated men, about the concerns of elite, educated men. The women who wore these earrings, the craftsmen who made them, the children who might have inherited them — they appear in the texts only rarely, and usually in passing. The objects they left behind are, in some ways, their only direct speech.

What This Site Does

AUREA is a project in close looking.

Each article focuses on one object or category of objects from the ancient Mediterranean world. I take these material objects seriously as primary sources, examining their material, symbolism and iconography, find contexts, and the ancient and modern scholarship that has tried to understand them. I place it back in the world it came from, as best as the evidence allows.

This is not a comprehensive history of ancient jewelry. It is something more like a series of portraits, with sustained attention to specific objects that have been waiting, quietly, for someone to look at them the right way.

Figures & References

Figure 1

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. “Pair of Earrings with Eros.” Gift of Mrs. Albert M. Lythgoe, in memory of Sherburne Hardy, 1930. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/25365.

Figure 2

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. “Gold Earrings with Disk and Boat-Shaped Pendant.” Gold and Silver. Rogers Fund, 1948. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/254595

Figure 3

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. “Gold Serpentine Fibula (Safety Pin).” Purchased by subscription, 1895. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/245986

Figure 4

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. “Gold Sanguisuga-type Fibula (Safety Pin) with Patterns in Granulation.” Fletcher Fund, 1931. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/253339

[1] Boardman, John. Greek Gems and Finger Rings. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970.

[2] Homer. Iliad, Book 14, ll. 153-221. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

[3] Ogden, Jack. Jewellery  of the Ancient World. New York: Rizzoli, 1982.

[4] Pliny the Elder. Natural History, Book XXXIII, Chapter 19. Translated by D. E. Eichholz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 1962.