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Message:: [QUOTE="Blake Davis, post: 3005990, member: 91820"]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."[/QUOTE]

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