Pair of earrings with Maenad heads,

late 4th–early 2nd century BCE

These are all objects meant to decorate and show off the body. Displaying the malleability of gold, each piece of jewelry is delicately and intricately constructed. On one pair of earrings, sculpted Erotes, winged child figures associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, hang from thin wire chains attached to each wing and would have gently swayed back and forth as their wearer moved. On another pair of earrings, the heads of maenads, the female worshippers of Dionysos, are sculpted on top of bases composed of hundreds of individual small spheres of gold and carefully coiled hoops. Beyond adorning the body of living individuals, beautiful gold objects like these were also often funerary in function. Some examples, such as the wreath, with its extremely thin leaves and crown too small to be worn, were likely too fragile to have been used for embellishment, and were possibly created exclusively to accompany the deceased individual.