These are some amazing first ancient coins! My first ancients were a group of about 15 low quality ancients that I paid way too much for because I didn't know any better. After that, I bought a ton of low quality lots off of ebay, again having no clue what I was doing. By and large, I've parted ways with nearly all of the coins I bought in my first year of collecting ancients. By luck, I did find this in maybe the third lot I ever purchased, still one of my better lot finds to date Theodora AE4 PIETAS ROMANA, Trier mint
Christmas, 1957, my somewhat disreputable (but fun and loving) Weird Uncle Lester gave me this group of five "Roman" coins (only one is an official Roman Imperial piece) : Philip I and Tacitus Alexandria potin tetradrachms, posthumous dupondius of Faustina Sr., and Tetricus I & II Gallic Empire antoniniani. I had some fun with them during my "tween" years - when several of us neighborhood kid/collectors got together and got to comparing collections. I "won" our ad-hoc contest for "who's got the oldest coin(s)?" too many times until my friends refused to consider my ancients eligible any longer. Soon, though, I became a teenager who was, of course, way too cool to collect coins. That lasted until my early 20's in the early '70's when, having gone back to accumulating US and modern World material, in a mixed "cigar box lot" I'd bought, this piece turned up: http://old.stoa.org/gallery/album165/58_Cpls_TRE_b?full=1 And I said: "Aha! - I know what this is (sorta...)". Taking it in to the local coin shop in hope of finding a somewhat tighter ID than "Roman", I got a recommendation to acquire a copy of David Sear's "Roman Coins and Their Values". It wasn't long at all until I had changed my focus almost totally to ancients - and so it began, and I've hardly looked back since.
That’s a great recollection of a moment in your history. I can certainly relate. I too had an uncle who was into some shady dealings and he would show up on Christmas and no other time of the year. All I had to do was ask for something and he would get it for me. If I had been interested in ancient coins back then, I’m sure he would have miraculously produced them.
I started in ancients around 1992 or 1993, when the local coin store near my college got a bunch of cleaned but unidentified junk box ancients. I bought a few of the better-preserved coins, and this is the first I was able to identify: Constantius II, FTR, Sirmium mint.
I guess all of us of "a certain age" probably have half a shoebox full of curling old B&W Brownie shots of Christmases in a previous century - we, of course, are the babies and the kiddies in the shots. They are amazingly interchangeable from family to family.
My first purchase of an ancient coin, about 3 years ago, and I now have only 20 or 30 ancient Roman coins plus 1 Greek. This one is 101 BC, Lucius Sentius, AR Denarius. I only dabble in ancients of this sort. It seems that lately I am getting into ancient coins of India and the Silk Road areas. It can be quite a chore to attribute them.