Taylor Swift pointed at her wedding ring and its estimated 8-carat diamond during the Chiefs game this week. 24 million people watched it live.
We do history here, so I asked: why the left? In Russia, the wedding ring goes on the right. Same across most of Eastern Europe.
Your wedding ring is on the left for a nerve that doesn't exist.
Around 170 AD, the Roman writer Aulus Gellius explained why his people wore their rings on the fourth finger of the left hand.
Egyptian embalmers, he wrote, had dissected bodies and found a fine nerve running from that finger straight to the heart. Romans didn’t dissect human bodies, so no one in Rome could check.
No one has ever found the nerve, and 1,850 years of weddings haven't moved the ring.
A bishop turned that fictitious nerve into a vein, and the Church of England wrote it into the wedding vows that came to America. Russia put the ring on the right hand for a different reason.
The route from an Egyptian embalming table to Taylor Swift’s left hand, and yours, starts at a Roman dinner party 260 years after Gellius.
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Rome heard a better reason and ignored it
Around 431 AD, a Roman official named Macrobius wrote the Saturnalia, a long dialogue set at dinner parties over the December holiday.
One guest asks about the ring finger. The doctor at the table repeats the Egyptian nerve story, and a guest from Egypt adds that priests in his country anoint that finger with perfume at the altar.
The wrong anatomy lesson Gellius wrote down around 170 AD was still being repeated in the 400s.
Macrobius also records a plainer reason, from the jurist Ateius Capito. The left hand works less, so a ring worn there takes fewer knocks, and the fourth finger kept the stone safest.
Capito’s answer was sensible, but history forgot it.
The nerve made a better story over dinner.
If anyone at your wedding told you that finger connects to the heart, the claim had already been dinner talk for 1,600 years.
45 years after Macrobius wrote, the Western Empire was gone. The nerve story outlived it.
