Recently I have been looking more and more into ancient coins and I have noticed that sometimes the same issued coin is larger and heavier and sometimes its smaller and lighter. I'm assuming it has chipped or it was just minted that way due to the lack of control back then. In searching for good examples I'm conflicted to whether I should go for larger heavier pieces. My thought is that a larger, heavier piece should be a finer example. Correct me if I'm wrong, but lets say there are two coins which are in the same condition but one is 1 gram heavier and 1mm wider. Shouldn't the larger one be a finer example? Though I'm not looking at this for investment purposes, I do want to add good coins to my collection.
Many factors play into the weight of a coin. Sometimes its the soil conditions of when the coin was in dirt & how much copper and such leeched out of it. Other times it could be how the coin was cleaned. But many times ancients have various weight differences. I could have one coin weigh 2.6g and another poster posts one in worse shape and it could be 3.5g. As for size, it doesnt make alot of difference since the coins were hand struck. So one could be struck lightly & the metal didnt spread out as much as one that was struck harder. Now for me I look for good weight on a coin. If a coin seems too light & its condition doesnt match the price I would pay for it, I wait till something better comes along. If the price is super & I can live with it's condition then I will settle for a lower weight one. But be careful as counterfeits can weigh much less so its good to know what the average weight of X coin is. Everyone is different.
Sizes and weight can and cannot matter. It depends. I like Mat's answer will add my own. IN ancient times they had very tight control of weight on PM coins. So from the mint your coin should have tight weight tolerances. Size will not matter really due to what Mat said. For PM coins, if you coin is overweight significantly first thing I would worry about is a fake. The ancients simply did not waste PM like that. If underweight, it could be from clipping, from soil leeching, cleaning, or a fake. For copper based coins, they were always of token value, so no huge effort was put in weight control. For them, weight is really not indicative of much, as long as your coin is within observed weight variations, which can be large. So, bottom line, weight was what was controlled on PM coins in ancient times. Many, many issues have variations in diameter, since pretty large. I will say though that generally a larger diameter coin is valued higher than a smaller diameter thicker coin of the same issue. THis is generally because more of the design will fit on the wider flan.
I'm actually astonished at how much detail some of the small Roman bronzes can contain. Something like the falling horseman motif is a remarkably complicated scene to depict on a coin of only 15 to 20 millimeters in diameter. The die cutters must have had very good eyes and very steady hands for that sort of microsurgery.
You are right, but I think for detail the Greeks were head and shoulders above the Romans. I have some very small (9mm) Greek coins where the detail will just blow you away.
The Greeks had better designs as well, at least to my tastes. There's a certain whimsy and artistry that's lacking in the very formal, often stuffy Roman issues.
Thanks for the comments. I was having a hard time deciding if it was worth paying more money for a coin just because it was a tad bit larger and heavier. Of course my first deciding factor is still the condition.
I would say, IMHO, no unless by it being larger more of the design is on the flan. If the smaller piece cannot show all of the design, but the larger one does, then the large one will be more valuable.
While most of this has been covered: What holds for one group of coins does not hold for all. Some issues were tightly controlled as to weight and fineness. Some coins were issued 'al marco' or a certain number were issued from a pound of metal but little care was taken to make each coin the same as all of its fellows. This might mean there would be a 2.5 and 3.5g example here and there but a thousand of them originally probably weighed exactly 3 kg. The guys at the mint were given a certain amount of metal and expected to produce a certain number of coins. Details on how that was accomplished varied from place to place. There are some issues that really make you think there were no controls at all but perhaps we are just missing the key bit of information. Could, perhaps, some heavy and well made coins been produced for paying the Praetorian Guard and some lesser junk for the auxiliary archers? We don't know. Should collectors pay attention to such things? There is nothing wrong with studying such matters but it is not as simple as buying the heaviest in every case. I have bought silver antoniniani that weigh twice the weight of others from the same ruler. This is partly because I want something to illustrate questions like the one asked here.
