My first ancient gold coin: a solidus of Arcadius

I really like the obverse of your coin, especially the details on the «hand of God».
Are you in Lebanon, by the way? 15 years ago I had some trips there, teaching music to the kids in the refugee camps. A Lebanese musician that I worked with told me that he would go for hikes and find places where he could dig up Roman gold coins.

 

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Beautiful coin Donna. And your write up is superb.
Arcadius appears to be winking at you.

 

Donna, Congrats..
It's a lovely piece!
J.T.

 

Thank you, @Al Kowsky. Perhaps needless to say, I agree with you that the visual appeal and 60-year provenance more than make up for the obvious wear on the coin, especially on the obverse. I think I got lucky in finding that particular combination. After all, I had been looking for a solidus I wanted to buy for some time. And given my self-imposed requirements, it wasn't easy.

If I were to look for another ancient gold solidus that met all those requirements -- and it'll be a while before I can afford even to look! -- it might not be easy. For example, here's another solidus of Arcadius currently for sale on VCoins for a couple of hundred dollars more than what I paid (and, therefore, a couple of hundred dollars above my $1,000 line):



Overall, I think it has noticeably less wear than mine, and would probably receive a higher grade than mine. But Arcadius's nose has that "smushed" look often encountered on full and 3/4 face coins, and I don't think Constantinopolis's face is as finely engraved as on mine. So I actually prefer mine, even aside from the lower price. (I've been informed privately that Dr. Busso Peus has a reputation for charging more reasonable prices for ancient gold than some other dealers, so I don't think there's anything fishy about the price he put on my coin, contrary to the implication in a later comment.)

Here are a few more currently available on the retail market, from Zeno, Anastasius, and Theodosius II, two for a couple of hundred dollars less than what I paid and one for a couple of hundred dollars more:








I think all have less wear than mine, and I would be happy to own any of them, but if I were to pick one, I might well choose mine again (even leaving aside the religious iconography on the second one and I think the first, neither of which is obvious enough to contravene my "no ultra-religious iconography" preference, or bother me at all).

 

@Orielensis, thanks so much for your summary of the article you found. (Much to my regret, my German reading skills aren't adequate for articles -- only for genealogical research (names, dates, places, relationships, etc.) -- so there isn't much point sending me the pages you found).

It certainly makes sense that Kress was previously connected to the Helbing firm through printing its catalogs. Otherwise, it seemed odd that a printer would want to enter the numismatic field. Perhaps that's how he acquired his initial expertise. I'm glad to know there's no evidence he was a Nazi party member, but of course it's true that he "seized an opportunity to financially profit from the persecution of his Jewish fellow citizens." I am sorry, but not surprised, to learn of Heinrich Hirsch's fate.

By the way, according to the tables at http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/projects/currency.htm#tables, 34,400 RM in 1938 was the equivalent of $13,815 1938 US dollars. (There are so many different ways of translating that sum into 2021 US dollars that I won't attempt to do so.) It does sound like rather a low total, even for 1938, for such an old and well-established numismatic firm. For comparison purposes, my mother grew up in Berlin in a middle-class (but by no means wealthy) household. My grandfather was a social worker and an officer of the Jewish Gemeinde (Community) of Berlin, heading the migrant welfare and passport office. Here is a page from his 1938 tax return that I was able to obtain from the Berlin archives, showing that his "Gesamtbetrag der einkünfte" (Total amount of income) for that year was 7,527 RM (I'm not sure how much of that was salary and how much was other income). Of course, when my grandparents had finally obtained their US visas and were finally able to emigrate via Lisbon, leaving Berlin on 27 May 1941, > 90% of their assets were confiscated under the guise of an emigration tax, even more than usual because they were ordered to leave the country on 24-hours notice. But the point is that a sales price for Helbing's assets that was less than five times my grandfather's income in 1938 was obviously low, perhaps so much so as to be essentially confiscatory.



The bottom line, though, is that I agree with @Curtisimo and @robinjojo that it's not the coin's fault. Who knows what nefarious characters have owned some of our coins over the last couple of thousand years! The only difference with this one is that we happen to be able to trace its recent history. (The downside of provenance research, I suppose.) More pertinently, though, as I noted before, it's extraordinarily unlikely that my specific coin, sold by Kress in 1960, was part of the Helbing (Hirsch) inventory sold in 1938. If it were, would I still have bought it? Given my specific family background, I'm not entirely sure I would have. One has to draw one's personal lines somewhere.

Separately, a question for @Curtisimo: do you remember where you found the restitution files you mention? I'm curious, because they're almost never available online. The ones I have for my mother and grandparents in Berlin came from the Berlin Landesarchiv, and the ones I have for my maternal grandmother and her family in Baden come from the Freiburg archive.

 

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Sorry, but I'm old. I don't understand.

 

I'm in a dentist's chair getting the first part of a crown done. My phone was in my pocket and posted all by itself.​

 

Beautiful gold coin and excellent write up on it's history. Can't beat gold coins and their ability to resist corrosion

 

@DonnaML......Wonderful looking coin with both sides nicely balanced!...Lovely detail, especially on the reverse and zooming in you can even see the fingers of Constantinopolis gripping the globe....Certainly a skilled engraver.....
The coin also looks very happy with its new owner as it seems as if Arcadius is winking!
Congratulations on a beautiful coin!
No gold here just a contemporary little bronze..

 

Whew! Maybe I'm not so old after all

 

Wow, 74 likes for my opening post? That has to be a record for me. I guess it just goes to show how much people like gold. I should have already known that. After all, I've seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre more than once!

It seems that Karl Kreß was printing the Otto Helbing catalogs as early as 1924. No wonder he wanted to buy the firm in 1938. See the lower left of this image, which I found in one of the several Helbing catalogs online at
https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/.

 

I saved this one for last. Because I thought that if I read it a second time, perhaps I would understand it better. I'm still a little puzzled, but I'll attempt to respond.

If you were trying to reassure me by telling me why I shouldn't be concerned, I appreciate the motive, but I'm afraid that you only succeeded in doing the opposite. I already said that there's basically no possibility that this coin was part of the Helbing inventory sold to Kress at a (probably) coercively low price 15 years before Kress auctioned the coin in 1960. But even if it had been, do you honestly think that the monetary value of the coin -- de minimis both in the abstract and compared to the billions of dollars of ancient and other art treasures the Nazis stole throughout Europe -- had anything whatsoever to do with my concern? As opposed to what would be its intrinsic character as an object stolen from a Jewish family, regardless of being only one among millions? No one has the right to tell me what is or isn't worth my "speculation." Especially since in this case my concern was based not on idle speculation about possibly nefarious owners of an ancient coin over a 1600-year period, but on actual knowledge of a specific owner's association with the Nazis' confiscatory activities, within living memory.

This I don't understand. So what if its intrinsic metal value is or was very low? That was true of almost all individual gold coins back then. The USA wasn't the only country that had a low fixed price per ounce for gold at the time. So most of the value of the individual coins Helbing and other dealers sold was probably numismatic, rather than intrinsic metal value. I don't think that the metal value of individual ancient gold coins had anything to do with whether such coins were illustrated in Helbing's catalogs, either before or after the sale to Kress in 1938. Needless to say, as shown in the OP, Kress himself illustrated my coin in his 1960 catalog, when he was still calling himself Otto Helbing Nachfolger [Successor]. And if you're referring to the years prior to the sale, you're still wrong. For example, see this catalog for Helbing's Auction 63, held on 29 April 1931 in Munich, and available online at the Heidelberg University website:



Take a look at p. 59, listing a series of Late Roman/early Byzantine gold solidi, at nos. 1312-1329:



In other words, solidi very similar to mine. And guess what all those asterisks mean? They mean that those coins were illustrated in the catalog! They "made it," notwithstanding their very low intrinsic metal value! See Plate 34:



And, lest you think that these were all particularly valuable solidi, note this final page from the list of estimated prices for each lot, at the front of the catalog:



As you can see, almost all the estimated prices for lots 1312-1329 (many of them illustrated) were below 100 RM, at a time when there were 4.2 RM to the US dollar. See p. 3 of the catalog, the first page of the estimated price list:



In other words, of course my coin could have been illustrated in one of the plates in a Helbing catalog before 1938, just as it was in 1960 when the firm was owned by Kress.

But this has basically been an academic exercise on my part, to show that it's entirely possible that an earlier illustrated provenance could exist for my coin, whether with Helbing or another dealer. There could just as easily be an earlier "trace" of my coin as for most other coins that already have a provenance back as far as mine. But I have no real interest in undertaking a search for one, given the logical conclusion that the coin was very unlikely to have been in the Helbing inventory before 1938. Furthermore, as @AncientJoe commented above, the key date for legal purposes is 1970 (when the UNESCO Cultural Property Convention was enacted), and my coin has "the significant added benefit of a pre-1970 pedigree!" So an earlier provenance than the one I already have from 1960 would have no great practical value to me other than satisfying curiosity. If I happen to come across one, great, but I'm not going to put in effort to look for it given my conclusion that it wasn't part of the Helbing-Kress sale.

I'm even more puzzled by this comment. First of all, I'm not sure I see what you mean. But if you mean the two nicks on the rim on the reverse, they're a little far apart to constitute evidence of mounting, not to mention that they're not anywhere near 12 o'clock on either side: they're in the upper right quadrant on the reverse and would be in the lower right quadrant on the obverse. But even if the coin has, in fact, been mounted in the past, what difference does it make? It seems to have passed through the hands of various dealers in the last 60 years without anyone noting it, and I don't think such a history detracts from its visual appeal or its value. The 325 DM price it sold for in 1960, on a 300 DM estimate (see the catalog page in the OP), was in the higher range of other solidi on the page.

Furthermore, your entirely speculative comment that "the seller appears to have been quite eager to let it go for a very small profit margin" -- presumably meaning Dr. Busso Peus Nachf. -- doesn't seem to have any factual basis that I can figure out. What gives you this idea? Busso Peus apparently bought the coin on 23 Nov. 2020 at the Auktionen Münzhandlung Sonntag Auktion 33, as Lot 36, for a realized price of 600 € on an estimate of 400 €. See https://www.coinarchives.com/a/lotv...7&Lot=36&Val=884de736d01e26da3d2ff6bc3e553588. It then listed the coin for sale (as one might expect it to do!) for an asking price of 900 €. Is that really being "quite eager"?

I don't mind saying that I paid that asking price, minus a 5% discount which the dealer offers to all non-EU customers -- not only for this coin -- for an actual price paid of 855 €, or just above $1,000. I'm no mathematician or accountant (and since I retired I've been happy to forget everything I ever had to learn about this sort of thing as an attorney practicing commercial litigation), but it seems to me that a price of 855 € on a 600 € investment represents a 255 € profit, or a 29.8% profit margin. Even if you add another 20% (120 €) to the dealer's cost for the presumable buyer's fee, you still have a 135 € profit on a 720 € investment, or a 15.8% profit margin if I'm calculating correctly. Is either of those fairly characterized as a "very small profit margin" for ancient coin dealers? (Obviously I don't know enough to calculate net profit margin, and I doubt you do wither.) More importantly, there's no reason whatsoever to believe that the dealer's profit margin was materially less on this coin than on the other ancient coins it sells, or, even if it were, that that somehow means that there's something wrong with the coin, as you attempt to imply.

 

I was trying to say that the possibility of having someone coming up with a photofile of stolen objects from the museum of xyzburg or from a private collection is zero, because (1) the coin is of a low collectable value so it was propably never photographed and (2) the metal value is so low to make it a huge crime.

The 1970 unesco convention pardons items that were illegally excavated not the stolen ones.

If you manage to find an Arcadius in the Helbing plates let me know.

Looking at the coin itself and letting aside the provenance, as I wrote there are some marks around the edge that could point to a prior mount. Dealers do not describe such marks and pretend to include them in a VF grading and people get surprises from NGC. The 15% gross profit (130 euros or so) which will be then taxed does not justify the dealer's effort to buy, catalog, list the coin, pay a commission to the platform shop, send you scans and even offer you a 5% discount for a newly listed item.

 

I am not at all surprised by all the "likes" Your research into your coin's historical past is truly amazing. This is what makes this forum so great I can hardly wait for you to post your next golden treasure.

I am hooked on watching "Curse of Oak Island"

Here is my other Arcadius....
John

 

Donna, I have enjoyed this discussion, and I’m impressed by what you are able to find in your researches, of old plates and images. Really well done!
When reading the quoted passage above, I just wanted to share a perspective on gold vs currency: You call the fixed price «low» on gold. The fixed 35$/ounce price for gold was a semi gold standard after the New Deal got rid of the old gold coins. This was the Bretton/Woods agreement from 1944:

«The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained its external exchange rates within 1 percent by tying its currency to gold and the ability of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bridge temporary imbalances of payments. Also, there was a need to address the lack of cooperation among other countries and to prevent competitive devaluation of the currencies as well.» (Wikipedia)

Now, if there is a fixed price on gold, it isn’t necessarily high or low; it just is what it is, and it rather defines the value of the currency. So the «low» price on gold (which was fixed to 20$/ounce before 1933), defined the dollar, and made the dollar strong. Other currencies were again pegged to the dollar, and this created stability. When Nixon removed the 35$ fixed price on gold, blaming international «speculators» in 1971, the currencies became less stable:



I think this is one of the fascinating features about gold coins.

 

I understand what you're saying. My statement that the fixed price of gold was "low" back in the 1930s was simply a response to the argument that the intrinsic metal value of my coin was so low as to make it unworthy of being photographed for an auction catalog, or my being concerned about whether it was confiscated by the Nazis. My point was basically a "so what" response: that if the intrinsic metal value of my coin was low back then, so was the intrinsic value of most gold coins, and it certainly didn't stop them from being photographed. And that monetary value had nothing to do with my Nazi-related concerns anyway.

 

PPRP, I was privately warned about your penchant for being contrary for the sake of contrariness. I don't even know why I bother to respond anymore. You've descended to the point of maliciousness in trying to denigrate my coin.

What? What? This doesn't make any sense at all. Who was ever talking about my coin being stolen from a museum or private collection (in the sense of a burglary, rather than in the sense of a state-sponsored confiscatory forced sale)? Are you now trying to claim that there's something illegitimate about my coin's provenance wholly apart from the Kress connection? What relevance does any of this have to your previous argument (clearly raised in the context of auction catalogs) that I'm unlikely to find pre-1960 photographic evidence of the coin because its low metal value meant it wasn't worth being photographed for an auction and wouldn't have "made it" into a pre-1938 Helbing catalog -- an argument I already proved was nonsensical by showing the many very similar coins illustrated in a 1931 Helbing catalog? Even apart from the fact that it was photographed by Helbing's successor in 1960, and had a comparatively high auction value then? And even apart from the fact that it's clearly very unlikely that the coin was in Helbing's inventory in 1938, so it strains credulity to suggest it was in Helbing's inventory separately, sometime before that? And even apart from the fact that I'm not looking for a pre-1960 provenance anyway?

The point of raising the UNESCO Convention, quoting @AncientJoe, was not to address your fabricated "coin stolen from a museum or private collection" issue; of course the Convention doesn't insulate stolen goods, and I didn't claim that it does. The point was to agree with @AncientJoe that the coin's value is greater because I now have documentary proof that it was outside the jurisdiction of Turkey, or any other country that might theoretically claim it as "cultural heritage", by 1960, i.e., a decade before the Convention was enacted.

Are you serious? There's something special about solidi of Arcadius that made them unworthy of being photographed for a pre-1938 Helbing catalog, unlike the solidi of his brother (Honorius) and son (Theodosius II) and others from that period which are illustrated in the 1931 Helbing catalog, as I demonstrated above? I have to go hunting through all other pre-1938 Helbing catalogs available online to find an illustration specifically of an Arcadius solidus in order to satisfy you? Do you have any idea how asinine that sounds? I'm not your servant.

As I already said, what difference does it make even if your speculative theory that my coin was previously mounted were correct? I have no plans to sell it, let alone submit it to a TPG, and it's already been proven at least twice before I bought the coin that your invented history of mounting hasn't affected the coin's visual appeal or market value. And since when would a theorized history of possible mounting prevent a VF grade even if I were to submit the coin to NGC? Which I won't, because I don't care about grades; I care about how a coin looks?

Furthermore, your assumption that Busso Peus, one of the oldest and best-established dealers in Germany, knew all along that the coin has something wrong with it, makes no sense. If that's the case, why did they spend ca. 720 € on it including the buyer's fee? You think they weren't as capable as you of detecting this fatal flaw from the photos before they bought it? As for all your unsupported claims about an insuffiicent profit margin, supposedly proving that there's something wrong with the coin, are you a dealer? Without evidence as to this dealer's profit margins on other coins, or that this coin is an outlier -- or, even if it were, the reasons for it -- I have no reason to pay attention to anything you say. I already told you that they offer a 5% discount on all of their coins to all non-EU buyers. So you can't rely on that. As for sending me scans from the 1960 auction catalog -- whether from their own library or the previous dealer, who had already mentioned the provenance in their description last year -- most dealers are happy to do that if they have documentation from old auctions. Why shouldn't they share it? I would have been surprised if they didn't. It proves nothing about their supposed eagerness to sell, especially since they sent me the scans after I bought the coin!

The bottom line is that I like the coin regardless of what you think, and, apparently, so does everyone else here but you. Nobody's asking you to buy it! So enough already. You're approaching conspiracy theory level. And I won't let you ruin my enjoyment of the coin no matter what you say.

 

My intention was not at all to ruin your enjoyment of your coin. I initially didn't even respond specifically to you. If you ever go through the Helbing catalogs -without feeling that you are my servant- then take a few seconds to reconsider what I wrote.

 

OK - but please tell me first what I'm looking for? What is it about Arcadius solidi that supposedly disqualifies them from having been illustrated in pre-1938 Helbing auction catalogs, as opposed to all the other illustrated solidi I posted from that one 1931 Helbing catalog, from other emperors, around the exact same time-period? What makes you think that the fact that that one catalog happens not to have had any solidi of Arcadius is more than coincidence? I don't get it.