Tell the truth. Have you played this trick with your jewelry?

​Roman women wore a profusion of custom-made, hand-crafted jewelry including earrings, bracelets, amulets, necklaces, pendants, rings—and mind you, they wore all those items at once—plus one of various kinds of head pieces like a tiara, coronet, diadem, or the gilded wreath pictured here.

In The Deadliest Hate, Miriam was not above the trick women have been playing for millennia with their jewelry:

So, in a pretense of smoothing my hair, I covered my ear with my flattened palm. Then thumbing open the catch at the back of my earring, gripping the hoop between my first two fingers, concealing the rest of it as I pulled it free, I lowered my hand and slipped the earring inside the band around my tunic.

“Good heavens,” I exclaimed. “I’ve lost my earring! That must have been the tinkle I heard in the atrium. Excuse me, but I must get it. The pair belonged to my mother.” So, feigning alarm, I got up from the couch, steadying myself against its edge so no one could see my legs trembling, and headed back to those oily, dark doors.

And what do you suppose Miriam found behind those oily, dark doors?

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