Galerius Follis

I just pulled this guy out of my mailbox and had to post almost immediately because I was not prepared for how friggin cool he looks and feels in hand. I've never had an LRB this big, or this sharp. It's actually the first one I've owned that I didn't feel like I could swallow it without choking (which I know is kind of weird, but when you get coins that are barely larger than the pills of ibuprofin your doctor prescribed you, they might get compared to ibuprofin pills).

Now the message board conventions:

Galerius was emperor from 293-305. He killed a lot of Carpi folk who, according to Wikipedia, lived in what is today eastern Europe. He didn't like Christianity much, but he got OK enough with it to issue the Edict of Toleration in 311, which stopped the whole thing where the Romans would throw Christians to the lions and generally treat them like they weren't very important.

^if I got any of the history stuff wrong, don't be shy about saying so^

 

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10/10

 

Very nice coin, congrats!
Coins from the Tetrarchy are lacking in my collection, I only have a Follis of Diocletian
Cheers!

 

Great addition. They are neat to hold even though I am not a fan of the era's coinage.

Looks to have some silvering left too, which is a plus.

 

Thanks guys! I had no idea I'd feel so good about this coin. It was one of those where I just figured maybe I'll win it and maybe I won't and no biggie either way.

And there is silvering! And it's a lot brighter in-hand than in the dealer photos. I may try to get a picture that shows it later on, which I should take my own photos of this anyway because of that blurry reverse photo.

 

Yeah, these big coins are fun. I had the same reaction when I first started collecting ancients - I had bought a handful of smaller Constantinian coins, then I bought this follis of Constantius Chlorus. I wasn't expecting it to be the size of a half-dollar (which shows you how much attention I paid to the clearly stated dimensions)...

 

Take your own images. It's much more satisfying.

Nice coin. I do like this era of coins and own several.

Galerius


CONSTANTIUS I

 

That was my experience completely, except I have the excuse that the dealer for my coin didn't list the size . I looked it up on Wildwinds today when I saw that USPS had got it as far as my town, but when I saw the size figured I must have misattributed it or something.

And your follis is even more impressive than I would have thought yesterday, when I didn't know that these things came in a dinosaur-size option.

 

Bing: At some point I'll have to buy a lens for it... currently I have an adaptor that allows me to mount a 40mm lens backwards on my camera, which acts as a macro lens, but that leaves the aperture wide open so there's a razor-thin plane of focus and on top of that, no electronics so to focus I have to lean closer or further from the coin, which is an awful way to take photos.

 

We've been talking about cameras for coin images on some other threads. I believe the consensus is that any cheap point and shoot with macro capability does what is needed.

 

very nice new follis hoth! yeah, it sure isn't an ae4 is it?

here's one i recently picked up. i pretty much new what to expect, but it still "wowed" me when i pulled it out of the envelope. one of my favorite coins this year.

 

^if I got any of the history stuff wrong, don't be shy about saying so^

Suggest you go back and research the death of Galerius. That was a part of his story.

 

Nice big coin hoth2. I never considered comparing coins to pills though. Interesting idea (Should I decide to doing it I will certainly start training with denarii or AE4 rather than folles, and keep sestertii for dessert )

Q

 

These are my second and third ancient coin purchases - and also an initial attempt at getting some recognizable photos. (Ya, that attempt was yesterday)



Dioclectian, AD 284-305
AE, Follis, 9.8g, 28mm; 1h; Aquelia, Italy
Obv.: IMP DIOCLETIANUS PF AVG; laureate head right
Rev.: SACR MONET AVGG ET CAESS NOSTR; crescent in left field, VI in right field; Moneta holding sclaes and cornucopiae
In Ex.: AQP

And my third purchase...

Maximian, AD 289 - 305
AE, Follis, 8.8g, 31mm; 6h; Heraclea, Turkey
Obv.: IMP CMA MAXIMIANVS PF AVG; laureate head right
Rev.: GENIO POPV-L-I ROMANI; Genius standing left, modius on head, naked except for chlamys over left shoulder (falls low), holding patera from which liquid flows and conucopiae
In Ex.: HTΓ

 

Hey, those pics look great, Jwt! Are you using a white background?

 

Well thanks! The color is pretty close to what it looks like...except for that background. I've spent too many hours trying to figure out a way to change the color and yielded no results I was pleased with. I want to get set up like Doug describes on his site but I'm without lamps. Hmmm. I may post the other 12 later, but not here, they're too small.

 

Oh, it was with a point and shoot bought new in 2013, that does have a macro, and a tripod.

 

Your camera might have a manual white balance feature, in which you take a pic of the background, and the camera learns that as white. The background is coming out a bit purplish, so in an image editor, if you suck out some blue and red, you get closer to the true color of the coin.

In this edit, I also adjust the brightness down slightly, and the contrast up - it brings out the details a bit more, and I've resized it to 1000 pixels wide. Images on the forum don't really need to be much bigger than that.

 

These photos are all good enough that they could be tweaked in any of several photo processing programs. I use Photoshop Elements but there are free ones that could do the job. I regret that I have not experienced with each of the choices so I can't say which works easily and which might not.

 

You have the coin in hand and are the only one to know what the true color looks like. However, I took JA's image and lightened it a bit, but I did not change the color setting. So you can see, just tweeking an image can change it dramatically. We now have three images of the same coin with three colors.