Just wanted to post a few photos of what happens when I get to thinking I know what I'm doing. Still very new to ancients but the desire to horde them is on a cycle of enexponential growth, with an ability of attribution flat lined. Feel free to critique.
I'm new to ancients collecting.. so far I have 2 I like the way you displayed them in your 1st picture comparing the sizes to a more modern coin. Looks like they are looking and having a meeting with Mercury
I like the group picture too, or would if it were better lit and in focus. The other pictures are HUGE; it is much easier to look at the coins when they are edited to show the obverse and reverse together. 800 to 1000 pixels wide (for the pair) is sufficient to see the details. As for attributions, how far have you proceeded? What type of help are you looking for?
Each of these will be relatively easy to ID except for the small one in the center which lacks important parts of the legend. You may not care now about details of ID but it would be good practice to try to figure out what you have here. Like over half of my coins purchased over the last 50 years, you will be hard pressed to sell these for any fraction of what you paid but there is education to be had here worh several times as much as the coins themselves. Dealers and advanced collectors usually have as many lower grade coins as they can handle and do not want to tie up capital in things they may find hard to sell. I do agree with TIF that you would do well to practice photography and present images here that will enable others to learn from your coins or help you with them as needed. The Coin Talk software will downsize images to fit a screen and paired images are easier to keep straight so that is a good thing to learn. As an exercise, I'd start with the center and bottom bronzes which are covered by a great ID help site: http://esty.ancients.info/ricix/ Look at the images of reverses and find the best match to your coins. Click on that to see which rulers used that type and which mints produced them. The bottom coin should be easy but the smaller center one will not.
Nice group-photo, Homer (congrats on your new mini-hoard) => oh, and congrats on catching Dark-side fever!! I'm sorry to say that once it kicks-in, it is almost impossible to cure!! Yup => you'd better be polite and tell your US Coin friends "goodbye"
Thanks, as for now I don't have a computer, just a cell phone, which also serves as my camera and photo lab. Any one know if there is an android app for photo editing? I've only had this phone for a couple days.
You don't have to have an app, although I'm sure there are many good ones. Try one of various online photo editors such as https://pixlr.com/editor/
Haven't gotten anywhere with the atribution but haven't expelled much energy on it either. The silvers I bought from a metal detectorist in Ukraine. He kinda pointed me in a direction. The bronzes I know nothing about, nor did the sellers. They aquired them while puchasing collections. I have very little in all of them. Maybe 10 a piece in the silver and a couple bucks a piece in the bronzes.
@ Homer .. I can read Antoninus Pius on the last coin. Others may well be of late Roman bronzes such as Emperor Constantius etc,,
The price is right. The second of your two denarii of Commodus shows Apollo with lyre with the less usual APOLLONI PALATINO legend. My example has the more common dated variation. I doubt anyone would pay extra for your more scarce coin because it is missing so much of the legend and lacks eye appeal above the price range you paid. My coin below is the common, dated variety abbreviating the name while yours spells it out and lacks the dating devices. http://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=2337772 Your other Commodus denarius is also a less common variation but the above coin is a match found online by searching on "commodus denarius victory" nd scrolling down to find one that matched. This is a way to ID coins but you have to know something to select proper search words. In this case your coin has the abbreviation of SAEC FEL (Saeculi Felicitas) missing on the more common variations. Your coin is easier to read if you compare the bumps to the letters on the better specimen online. That is why the online one sell for 5x what you paid and, IMHO, is worth more than that. Your other denarius clearly reads ANTONINVS AVG PIVS PP TRP X on the obverse but searching on that string turned up nothing of use so I searched antoninus pius cos iiii using the reverse legend clear on your coin and the ruler name I recognized from experience. http://www.acsearch.info/search.htm...s=1¤cy=usd&thesaurus=1&order=0&company= That gave a lot of hits but a couple show a reverse figure telling you the name of the goddess of plenty Annona so another search on antoninus pius cos iiii annona denarius gave closer hits http://www.acsearch.info/search.htm...s=1¤cy=usd&thesaurus=1&order=0&company= There are so many date variations that you may not find a perfect match but you can get the basics as a starting point. Getiing perfect ID's might require buying some books that are not cheap or asking help on CT from people who own them. The point here is this is mystifying in the beginning and gets a little more clear with practice. Rarely have I seen three denarii as hard to track exactly but you seem to have got the less common option in each case. Since no one is trying to gather all of the many variations here, being more rare may not get you any bonus but can make the process harder. When I said 'practice' I did not mean a few times but many over a period of years. That is the hobby as I know it. Buying fully IDed coins is easier but not cheaper unless you count the investment in time and references you might make to educate yourself. I consider that part of the fun.
Thank you very much. Being a US coin collector first, I understand the experience needed to help with identification. I rarely see a coin I don't know a little about, or enough about to easily help with research. Being new to ancients, makes this quite a bit more challenging. One thing I learned, just by posting this thread was when you said to start with identifying the reverse. Totally opposite of what I would do with moderns. I see lots of coins posted on this site and if I see something interesting, I research it for any info I may not know. I haven't done that with ancients because I really don't have enough experience to even know where to start. The funny thing is that if I aquired a exceptionally rare coin, it would just be luck, because I would have no idea. I do have enough of an eye to comfortably stay away from the fakes, and I have seen many, but my inexperience may have kept me away from an authentic coin.
Doug was having some difficulty getting a hit for your Antoninus Pius because the "I" in "XI" at the end of the obverse legend was close to the tip of the bust and easy to miss. A search for "antoninus pius xi denarius annona" in acsearch turns up some other examples of your coin (RIC 162) : http://www.acsearch.info/search.html?term=antoninus pius xi denarius annona&category=1-2&en=1&de=1&fr=1&it=1&es=1&ot=1&images=1¤cy=usd&thesaurus=1&order=0&company= As a side note, I've never seen a TRP X coin of Pius. I did a quick check in RIC (Roman Imperial Coinage, the standard general reference for these coins), and regarding his coins with tribunician dates, it has this to say : "TR.P.X (AD 146-7). Dated coins of this year probably [emphasis added] occur, but are very rare. The only known type is that of the Emperor sacrificing, a type of the 'vota decennalia'." Nifty info, huh? Welcome to the Dark Side!
I hope you stick around - once I got serious there was no looking back for me. Check vcoins.com for something you like, there are a lot of reputable sellers there. By all means, if you find an interesting coin, don't hesitate to ask the board. With that said...if it's an auction PM a forum member here instead of asking openly. My first ancients were late Roman bronzes (LRB) and I think they're a great way to get into ancients because very nice examples can be had for modest amounts of money and there is a lot of information freely available.
