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The Aemilia Ring
The ring is gold and weighs 7.5gms. It was made by the opus interrasile technique - a rare decorative form for an object found in a Roman context in Britain. By this technique a design was first picked out by drilling or punching holes through a gold sheet. These holes were then enlarged and improved by means of a small chisel. Some distortion of the leaf-stops on a similar ring makes it clear that the decoration and motto were executed first while the band was still flat and then the ends were hammered together to form the ring. The technique was time-consuming and the results, as a consequence, would have been expensive to buy. The use of a personal name as an integral part of the decoration suggests that they were made to order.

The motto reads AEMILIA ZESES (Aemilia may you live). The word zeses is a Greek version of the Latin vivas: in this case the craftsman has translated the expression of goodwill into Greek (zeseias) and back into Latin again, losing something in the translation. It is this wording
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