There is a curious Hindu superstition to the effect that anyone who wears a ring on the middle finger will probably be attacked and bitten by a scorpion. For this reason the Hindus are said to avoid wearing any rings on this finger, although the others are laden with them, each finger-joint having its special adornment.[102] In the Græco-Roman world also there was a prejudice against decorating the middle finger with a ring. Regarding the liberality with which the Greeks and Romans of the second century of our era used ring adornments for their fingers, the great Greek humorist Lucian gives testimony. In his writing entitled “The Cock,” he makes a character relate a dream in which the dreamer thought that a rich man had just died and had left him his fortune. Thereupon, in his dream, he saw himself arrayed in splendid raiment and wearing _sixteen_ rings on his fingers.[103] Of the affectations practiced in ring wearing by some _nouveau-riches_ foreigners in Roman times, Juvenal says: When one sees an Egyptian plebeian, not long before a slave in Canopus, carelessly throwing back over his shoulder a mantle of Tyrian purple, and seeking to cool his perspiring fingers by wearing summer-rings of openwork gold, as he cannot bear the weight of gemmed rings, how can one fail to write it down in a satire?[104] Indeed, to judge from the weight and size of some of the rings that have been preserved from ancient times, this practice was not quite so foolish as it may seem, for in the moist heat of the dog-day in Rome such heavy rings may well have been a burden. With the Roman ladies rings bearing images of the animals worshipped by the Egyptians came into fashion in Imperial times, favored no doubt by the enthusiastic worship of Isis and Serapis. Such rings are said to have been worn almost exclusively by women up to the reign of Vespasian, when men began to wear them also.[105] In ancient Rome it was not unusual for the admirer of a philosopher or a poet to wear his portrait engraved on a ring-stone. One of the elegies of Ovid[106] (b. 43 B.C.), written during his banishment from Rome, by order of Augustus, alludes feelingly to this custom. The poem is addressed to a faithful friend, who wears the poet’s portrait in his ring, and Ovid says: “In casting your eye upon this, perhaps you sometimes say, ‘how far away is poor Ovid now!’” He died in exile in 18 A.D. So huge were the proportions of the Roman emperor Maximinus (d. 238 A.D.), who rose from the ranks to the imperial dignity, that he is said to have used his wife’s bracelet for a thumb-ring.[107] The great size of some of the Roman rings to be seen in collections indicates that they could only have been worn on the thumb.