Ca. 100 AD. A matched pair of rare gold pendants shaped as a bird’s claw. The surface of each gold pendant is decorated with a fine granulated pattern. The three endings of each pendant display a small gold bead. There is an integral hoop at the top for attachment to a clasp. Aristocratic Roman women owned expensive jewellery. Information about jewellery is gathered from inscriptions and statues as well as excavated material. We also have several references to jewellery in contemporary literature – usually by male satirists (e.g. Juvenal, Satires VI, 457) complaining about women’s extravagance in this respect. Pliny says that women spent more on their ears than on any other part of their bodies and continued: “Women glory in hanging pearls on their fingers and using two or more for a single car-ring … as if they enjoyed the sound and mere rattling together of the pearls; nowadays even more people covet them — it is a common saying that a pearl is as good as a lackey for a lady when she walks abroad”. To find out more about Roman jewellery, see, for example, Higgins, R. (1980). Greek and Roman jewellery. London: Methuen.Size: L:Set of 2: 23mm / W:16mm ; 5.2gProvenance: Private UK Collection; From an old London collection formed in the 1990s.