Twisting and turning, a beautiful snake coils its golden body, ready to be slipped over the wrist of a Roman noble woman. Dating to the mid-second century B.C., the snake armlet is probably one of a pair, to be worn one on each arm.
The serpentine bracelet was not simply decorative, but would have served as an amulet, intended to protect the wearer. Although in Judeo-Christian tradition the snake is often associated with evil, in Rome the reptile had much more benign, even beneficent, associations: Snakes represented the spirits of the dead and were associated with the god of healing, Aesculapius, because they were used in cures at Aesclepions—temples of healing. (A vestige of this is seen today in the caduceus—the representation of a snake coiled around a staff that has come to symbolize medicine.)
Buried with ingots of gold, the bracelet was part of a goldsmith’s cache discovered in Rome. The style allows historians to pinpoint the bracelet’s date and provenance: The realistically upturned head, with each scale delicately detailed, is a Hellenistic design popular in the mid-second century B.C. But the more stylized curve of the tail is typical of Roman jewelry, suggesting that this bracelet was created in Rome by a jeweler familiar with the latest Greek styles.
Twisting and turning, a beautiful snake coils its golden body, ready to be slipped over the wrist of a Roman noble woman. Dating to the mid-second century B.C., the snake armlet is probably one of a pair, to be worn one on each arm.
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