Like many people I arrived at ancient coins through an interest in ancient history. The two interests - collecting (actually more of an obsession than an interest) are perfect together. I enjoy reading biographies by ancient authors - until recently I thought that meant Plutarch and only Plutarch, but recently I came across a volume of Diogenes Laertes in my favorite old book store. For those who never heard of him, Diogenes Laertes is best described as a biographer of the philosophers, exclusively Greek. Like many ancient authors not much is known about him, but he lived some time in the third century, and may have been from somewhere in Caria. His major work, "Lives of the Eminent Philosophers" provides detailed information on both the men described and their works, including listings of their writings. Unlike many ancient historians, Diogenes mentions and quotes from his sources - in reading DL you get a good sense of the enormity of the loss in ancient works. I have only read a small part of the work, but so far he has quoted from numerous authors, many of whom wrote multi-volume works, none of which have survived. In short, the value of DL is that almost none of the primary and secondary sources he quotes from have survived, leaving him as the only source, and certainly the only continuous source for the history of Greek philosophy. From what I understand his work is flawed, but then again, it may be that what we have is itself an epitomy of Diogenes, that the original work was far more detailed. I have once again side tracked myself - the purpose of this note (and this site), is not to discuss Greek philosophy, but ancient coins. I do look for references to coins in the works by ancient authors, but it is rare to find anything - thus far I have found only four: (1) Dio Cassius states that Caracalla debased the coinage. He also claimed that on one occasion silver rain fell out of the sky which he tried to use as a patina on base coinage, but it wore off (2) Pliny the Elder has a very interesting discussion on coinage in his work on Natural History (3) I came across a reference on the beauty of Greek coinage in the letters of Seneca, but despite a diligent search I have yet to rediscover it, and finally (4) late last night I found this fascinating quote from Diogenes on the life of Zeno, Book VII, 18, which is the reason for posting this thread (quote is from the Hicks translation of DL in Loeb, which is in the public domain): "He [Zeno]used to say that the very exact expressions used by those who avoided solecisms were like the coins struck by Alexander: they were beautiful in appearance and well rounded like the coins, but none the better on that account. Words of the opposite kind he would compare to the Attic tetradrachms, which, though struck carelessly and inartistically, nevertheless outweighed the ornate phrases." There is quite a bit to learn from this quote. First, that the ancients appreciated - or at least noticed - the comparative beauty of the coinage. And second, that the importance of the coin was not in its beauty, but in the weight of the precious metal therein. None of this is a surprise - after all if you lived in ancient times, it would hardly have been difficult to come by coins in a condition that today would be called stunning. Still, it is interesting that some attention is being paid to the comparative artistry of the coins. By the way, I recall reading somewhere that there is a book out there that compiles all of the ancient references to coinage. If you know of the book, please let me know. P.S. "Solecism" - I had to look it up - is defined as "non standard usage or grammatical construction."
Thanks for that wonderful anecdote, @Blake Davis! Wouldn't Zeno be surprised to see the current prices of those "careless and inartistic" owl tets, especially since they generally sell for more than the Alexander III coins he praised?
There is a two-volume work that does exactly this for Greek coins. Testimonia Numaria by John Melville Jones has "Texts and Translations" in volume 1, with 535 pages reproducing and translating 927 passages. Volume 2, "Commentary," comments on each passage over the course of 390 pages. Passages are organized by topic. What I found most interesting is how many passages are difficult to interpret with certainty and how many are flat out wrong about coins given what we know now. (Ancient commentators on the distant past often got things wrong.) If you want to know what the ancients said about Greek coinage, this is the book for you.
Nice thread Blake. I've kept a copy of Diogenes Laertes on my nightstand for about a year now - I read a few biographies of philosophers and DL's bad poems about them from time to time. A great read. I picked it up at the local library discard sale - best quarter I've spend in a while.
Very interesting thread Blake, thank you. One of the interesting usages of coins in the ancient world was placing one in the mouth of a dead person to pay the boatman who ferried them across the river Styx. So, the question is, which coin was it that they used - tetradrachm, denarius, aureus?
One of my favorite ancient coin references is from the Historia Augusta biography of Lucius Verus, who liked to go on pub crawls with non-Imperial low-lifes: "It was his wont also to hurl large coins into the cook-shops and therewith smash the cups." http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/historia_augusta/lucius_verus*.html A big, heavy sestertius of Lucius Verus - it'd smash a cup!:
Thanks. At some point I will probably do that, though I'll wait a bit since shipping books overseas is insanely expensive these days. Maybe it will pop up online in the US. I'm sure the commentary is worthwhile but I'm most interested in the text and translations anyway.
It probably depended on the wealth of the person who passed -that's an interesting question though - however I thought that the Romans burned their dead. If so how did they leave a coin in the mouth?
Charles Davis has both volumes listed - e.g. vol. 2: https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/ch...ii_addenda_and_commentary/875937/Default.aspx
I received my book (from Charles, since the amazon listing was in fact out of stock) and I want to report how AWESOME this work is. It is an absolute treasure trove of material and I'm so glad I learned about it. Thank you!
