Got this one at the tail end of summer last year but only got the urge to shoot and share it until now. This is a sestertius of Gordian III, with PAX AETERNA reverse. As for price, I am proud to boast that I got it at a super bottom-feeder price: $6.69 brought this one home with me. Its not the best but for what I paid I am glad I got it.
Thanks guys! Its a really chunky coin also. Hate to be at the business end of a sack full of these getting swung around.
Gordian sestertii can be very reasonable, cheap even, if you can overlook faults. Wear is the obvious one but you can get more detail if you can overlook things like huge cracks ($22) or nails ($9). Of course both of these were a few years ago so they might be a little more now but your experience suggests that this grade coin does not go up.
Brutal Jango, $6.69 => for that nice big, fat, chunky ancient coin!! (that's incredible, congrats) ... geeesh, that's pretty close to the price of a nice imported beer!!
Well for $6.69 you can't NOT buy that coin. Good catch! I've looked at quite a few sestertii of Gordian III myself, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. Eventually I will, but I haven't studied them as thoroughly as I'd like. I do appreciate the fact that even higher-grade examples are well within my budget.
Guy at the Bloomsbury coin fair had a sack full of dusty hoard Gordians and severus sestertii...he wanted £25 for single and 1£5 if you bought 20 or 30. They were in EF state.....they were top coins. I didnt buy any, but walked away with £10000 worth of uncleaned LRB's instead.
Which Severus? Any Septimius sestertius in EF is an expensive coin. My best is barely VF. Severus Alexander would be less but still more than a Gordian. The kicker here is the definition of EF. My best Gordian sestertius is a long way short of EF. Getting one even VF on both sides takes you out of the realm of the hoard coin as seen in most pick out pots. If the coins had decent surfaces, ears separated from laurel wreaths and detail on the reverse figure bodies, £25 would be a deal.
Alexander..... By the way, theres a chap who also sells on Vcoins who is clearly selling hoard sestertius on ebay at the moment....they need some cleaning, but some are £45 and others are £100. They are from the Gordian III/Philip era.........LAC(London Ancient coins). Yes the sestertius on display at the coin show were a bargain anyway, but i had no money left to spend. He had over 300, clearly getting shot of a load of coins he didnt want to clean. thats the trick to getting the good ones uncleaned.
