Nice
collection.
I'd be interested to read some answers here too. I believe I can offer something on 016 (the
Christogram - Chi crossing the stem of a Rho, the first two letters of the name Christos in Greek - is famous enough) and 0017. The
inscription on the latter reads (to me) "PATRICI VIVAS", with a
ligature on the VA, so "Patricius, may you live". While technically the vocative in -us nouns of this declension should be -e, -i occurs occasionally (notably in "fili"). Patricius as a
cognomen is attested from
the Late Empire. So perhaps the ring was owned by a Patricius, given to a Patricius, or born by someone of the household and/or clientela of Patricius. The
inscription "VIVAS" also seems to be rather common on
Late Empire rings: the context has been tied to Christianity (largely if extended to vivas in deo, may you live in God) (
cf. Ch.
Thomas, Christianity in
Roman Britain to AD 500).
As to the others, all I could offer would be guesses. I'm not sure whether depictions on
rings always have to mean something, though they often could: there are the famous signets of Pompey and
Sulla showing their victories, there are puns, birth-signs (Augustus'
Capricorn, although he wasn't a
Capricorn...), and a few are tied to gnosticism and magical protection (if they contain protective spirits like Abraxas/Abrasax or characteres magicae), but I would not exclude people wore a ring with a
hare because they liked rabbits. Pliny does tell us a
bit about such
rings (fancifully attributing their invention to
Prometheus). He tells us
Augustus began by using a
sphinx, not of
his own
choice, but because he found two such
rings in
his mother's possessions (Pliny, NH.37.10), but discarded them to avoid jokes about the riddles of the
sphinx; the interpretation came thus after the ring, not the other way around (if there Attia
had a reason to make
rings with a
sphinx, we aren't told them); Maecenas apparently used a frog: again, Pliny does not tell us whether there is a story behind this, or whether Maecenas liked frogs.
0024 and 0026 also seem to bear inscriptions, but I offer much
help with them. The first looks like a mother-bird feeding her chick or two
birds fighting over a worm, together with the
legend AVA. I would think it rather risky to give in to the temptation of linking it, even if only on the level of a pun with
avis, bird. 0026 seems to carry the letters CTTVS, although I'm having difficulty distinguishing them clearly. 002 might be letters, S.R. (?). All of this might be
abbreviations of names, sentences... or something else. For 003, one avenue to explore might be characteres magicae, but really, that's only desperation at the moment.
I
hope the first paragraph helped somewhat, and that the speculative and tentative proposals in the last do the job of getting someone else to have a closer look.
