What are some of your thoughts on these? I just nabbed a few at the show the other day just for the "cool factor".
Well I'm quite fond of them, and that's where most of my collecting money goes. I love being able to hold history in my hand, and I like how much variation there is compared to modern coins. For an idea of how much variety there is, Roman Imperial Coinage, the standard reference for Roman coins from 31 BC to 491 AD, is 10 volumes long, each volume being hundreds of pages. That series doesn't even cover provincial coinage, of which there are thousands of types. Because of this, there really isn't anything at all like the Redbook for ancient coinage. There's far too many types out there, and it's often hard to tell which minor variations in them collectors will care about at any particular time, and since the dies were carved and coins struck by hand, the quality of the coins varies a lot more from coint to coin, and the quality of such variations is very subjective. If you hang around the hobby long enough, you can get a feel for pricing, but it's never as easy as it is for modern coins (not that that is necessarily easy!). So would you mind sharing what you purchased? I'm curious.
I think Ancients are pretty cool, no matter how you look at them. My love of history is what drives me to collect coins and currency. I especially love ancient history. It just naturally goes togther, like milk and cookies I've always loved history, but it wasn't until recently that I really got into it big time. I would say around 2006 or 2007. Then, I discovered Numismatics, and...WOW! I can actually own and hold a piece of that history in my hand. It's incredible. Ancient Rome is my favorite time in history to read about and study. I will never get to Rome, despite my Italian heritage, as I am afraid of heights, and boats aren't much higher on my list of likes. And, even if I could get there, hundreds, thousands of years have passed and it would not be the same, as seeing the city in it's spendor. A Roman statue, how much does that cost? Lots. And where would I put it? No where. But a Roman coin...well...I can get them reasonably, and I can get a lot of them, and they won't take up much space. They are tangible links to the past, perhaps even MY past (we will never know, as no records were kept in Italy from the fall of the Roman civilization until the 1700s) and I can study them at my leasure. I can hold them in my hand, and it transports me back to the times I can only read about and wonder about. So...those are my thoughts on Roman coins. While that holds true for most ancients, I would suppose, I am more drawn to Roman times then any other, although I do have a difinitive interest in other areas of the ancient world. (After Rome, then come Greece in the ancient areas I am interested in...though Greek is one of the few cultures NOT represented in my gene pool!)
