My "new" book: Historical References to Coins of the Roman Empire by E A Sydenham. The book was first printed in 1917 and my reprint is from 1968. As my name states, I collect Roman Republican coins. I dabble in Imperial coins, but my main interests lie in the older coins. When I first started collecting ancient coins, I bought several LRBs and found them in copies of RIC at the Rice Library. It was a bit difficult, but interesting. When I switched to RR coins, I became aware of the difficulties of dating coins with few known events related to the coins. The first catalogs of RR coins, Babelon and others, were in alphabetical order. Props go to Count de Salis of the British Museum for placing their collection in chronological order and to Grueber who published Coins of the Roman Republic in the BM in that order. I thought the Imperial series was always in date order. After all the order of the rulers is known. Evidently, early Imperial coin books (Cohen) had the rulers in order, but the rest alphabetically. (This may not surprise those who collect post BC coins.) The book gives credit to several other scholars and then lists events that can help date coins in each series. I have found the first chapters interesting, the BC part and through the year of 4 emperors, 69. I will probably not plow my way through the whole book. The following pages are the index, dating Septimius Severus & Hadrian's travels. an interesting side note, the book if ex Franklin Mint library The cover plate gives two reprint dates: MCMLXVII and 1968. I must be missing something???
The reprint got the title wrong on the cover. It is not "Historical References to ...", rather "Historical References on Coins of the Roman Empire" (as you can see on the title page). That is, it discusses coins with types that refer to events. The reprint is dated 1968, but the original is from 1917. Although it is old, it is quite interesting and worth reading.
I have a copy of this book that I recently acquired as part of a group lot of books about the Roman Empire, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Guess I need to move it up my reading queue...
