How Old Were You When You Started Collecting Ancients?

lol, i know what you're saying, i ordered my 1st "collectors coin" in 2003, a $5 Bank of Iberia Apollo coin from a commercial that offered free shipping at the age of 44. i joined ebay Sept 15 2004 to buy ancients at 45. my 1st purchase was a few bronzes from "Rusty Romans" for a few dollars. the rest is history, so to speak.. so @chrsmat71, i may get the "late bloomer" award

 

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My dear ol' Granny got me started when I was very young (I was probably 4 years old => the year of the 1967 Canadian animal series)



... but I didn't start collecting ancients until I was in my mid 40's

=> oh, but I've kept the animal theme goin' in tribute to my sweet ol' Granny (RIP)

 

I think started at 3-4 with modern coins. I forgot when I got my first ancient.

 

49 when I bought my first ancients.

 

17 for moderns, and received my first medieval for my 18th birthday. First ancient happened in the same year (although I did have a long hiatus due to being a poor college/grad student)

 

Great post, Aethelred!

Ancient coins: 40 years old (I didn't catch the fever until much later)

*Old stuff (including old coins): 10 years old (approximately)

*Old stuff included old bottle caps, military medals, coins, bullet shells, military patches, old bottles, fossils, seashells, rocks and minerals, military, police, and fire department buttons and badges, political campaign buttons...etc. Actually anything old, cool, or weird.

I went through a Civil War battlefield relic period in my 30's.

When I was a kid, we had an old bottle dump in the woods behind our house that dated back to the 1920's. I found lots of old stuff there. I used to imagine that I was Dr. Louis Leakey digging through that stuff.

 

I was probably born with a french modern coin in hand.
Then 18 when my grand father gave me the Commodus sestertius that got me started into ancients

Q

 

U.S. coins - 11 years old.
Ancients - 15 years old

 

I started with ancients when I was 16-17-ish.

 

Started seriously collecting moderns in late in 2013.
Started collecting ancients in Dec 2014. (Thanks a LOT, @John Anthony ! ;-)

 

I was aged nine and was in a hospital bed in 1965 as I was having my tonsils removed ( very popular in the 60's!). The man in the next bed gave me several Seaby catalogues and I was interested. A week later an envelope arrived at home with two Republican Denerii with a note "hope you are well and imagine that someone held these coins 2000 years ago!" I had no real opportunity to collect ancients but started sorting coins out in my change and collected British milled coinage for years. Sadly the two ancients were lost in house moves or given away. Over the next 51 years I had an "on off" relationship with coins, very intense for a couple of years with pattern shillings, then traded the collection for military medals and then in early 2016 did a trade for some ancients and later that week picked up a novel set in ancient times and had an "Eureka" moment in which I realised I could never exhaust this subject to the end of my days. I was infatuated with the British Admiral Horatio Nelson for 20 years but completely satiated my appetite as I visited every historical site, read every book and even tried drinking in every Nelson Arms in the UK but eventually burnt out on the subject.
Given the diversity of this subject I can't see that happening, you only need to glance through this forum to see that!

 

I returned to ancients by about January, 2015 although I first started collecting ancient and modern coins by the late eighties....and sold virtually all of them by 2012. At this point, only my heir will sell my collection...and I will haunt him day and night if he does LOL

EDIT: I forgot the age....I started at about 38, sold them at about 62 and returned to it by 64 years of age.

 

I was 31 when I started collecting ancients. I'd been going through change and picking out the 'cool' coins and then buying Canadian and Newfoundland coins up until then.

My brother started collecting ancients at 27. Up until then, he had no real interest in coins.

Erin

 

Since early 20s.....36 now.

 

Ah yes, I remember it well...
It was right after Sputnik I, so I was 8 in 1957, and that's when my somewhat disreputable Uncle Lester gave me a Christmas present of an assorted handful of ancient coins. No one in the family was too keen on asking him exactly where he got them. I had been accumulating "collections" of damn near anything else I could drag home from about the time I could walk - including, at around age 4 or 5, US coins. This was approximately the age awareness dawned that "pennies have dates!", etc. Those first few ancients made for some serious bragging rights when all the coin-collecting neighborhood kids (and it seems like almost everyone collected coins & stamps, etc, at the time) got together to compare and trade. My Roman coins sort of blew everyone else out of the water. This lasted until the neighborhood consensus came around to saying "those don't count!". So obscurity and ignorance won out for the time being. Due to lack of access to useful information about them or knowledge about any way to add to the group, they were tucked away in a little jewelry box at the bottom of the box I kept my coins in.
Several years passed (before, as a teenager, I became too cool to collect coins,) as I continued to add to my US & World "holdings". Although the collection was eventually put aside (seems like many of us temporarily abandoned the pursuit during our hormone-drenched teens) it was neither lost nor completely forgotten, and all through college & young adulthood I always seemed to have a little bowl of some sort in which I kept any oddball coins which crossed my path. Few of those actually made it back to the "master collection" in my parents' attic and so I guess I wasn't "really" collecting at the time. Around '72 or '73, I rescued the old collection from my parents' closet so I could stash it in my own closet. Soon thereafter, however, I stumbled upon a pretty little CONSTANTINOPOLIS commemorative which reminded me of my Weird Uncle Lester and the ancient coins. They ignited intellectual interest in a way the others had never quite done. Finally I managed to make contact with folks who knew about and collected ancients, and what has proved to be an inextinguishable fuse was lit.
That's a gross total of about 60 years, and about 45 of more serious concentration and specialization in ancients.
So much else has been lost or had for various reasons to be abandoned along that road, but somehow I still have those original 6 coins from 1957:


Faustina Sr. posthumous dupondius


Gordian III as


Philip Sr. Alexandrian tetradrachm


Tetricus Sr. Gallic Empire antoninianus


Tetricus Jr. Gallic Empire antoninianus


Tacitus Alexandrian tetradrachm

And finally, the CONSTANTINOPOLIS which really set me on the road in about '73:

 

About 15 (1961)? I sold about 150 coins in 1974 (when my wife stopped working and my daughter was born) keeping only three which I know I had before 1963 but most records were thrown out after the sell off. I have shown foil pressings of some of my early coins here before. I discovered an ancient coin club in the mid 80's and got into it heavily then. I slacked off again in 2003 when I retired for the last time but did not sell off. Two thirds of my coins have been with me longer than that retirement. You people have been driving up prices on the junky coins I collect.

 

Moderns at age 6.
Ancients at 27 (1982-1989) then again in 2011.

 

I started collecting coins in '76, and ancients in '82, so I was 12 When I started collecting ancients

 

I received my first ancient coin as a gift for my 44th birthday.

 

Doug, you have probably noticed it's difficult to strike a happy medium between encouraging new collectors and thereby driving up prices or seeing prices plummet through lack of interest, but I definitely agree that prices on the sort of material (a fairly similar market-segment to your preferences) that I tend to buy have far outpaced simple inflation during the time I've been collecting.

I mostly hope to know that someone new will be there to continue being a caretaker for these beloved and long-lived artifacts of which none of us is really more than a temporary custodian.