The coin is a silver denarius (worth10 bronze asses) of the Roman Republic. It was struck in Rome about 151 BC under the authority of moneyer Publius Cornelius Sulla. The obverse shows the head of Roma (goddess of the city) with an X (value of the coin). The reverse shows Victory in a biga (2-horse chariot) with the inscription, P. SVLA (Publius Sulla). “V” in old Latin could stand for “V” or “U”. You might think his family name was Sulla, but it wasn’t. Sulla was a cognomen, a sort of nickname. His family name was Cornelius. Many Romans had a cognomen, but most didn’t. Cognomens, like Sulla, were often handed down one generation to the next. Others might indicate a country that the individual conquered, like Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, who conquered Carthage in Africa. He also had the familial cognomen of Scipio, which means staff or baton. The meaning of Sulla is not really known. Sometimes an inherited cognomen could be a bit of a joke. Gaius Julius Caesar had the family cognomen of Caesar, which meant bushy headed. Gaius had thin hair. And his family name was Julius, not Caesar. My coin was bought in 1987 from Richard Ponterio. He was an independent dealer then. Now, he’s executive VP of Stack’s Bowers. He graded it about MS. The pictures below were taken by me in the late 80’s. It was an advanced technique at the time because they were taken digitally. Back then, dealers and collectors were using film cameras. I had an AT&T PC (made by Olivetti in Italy). And equipped it with a video capture board (a new technology) and had a nice Sony 8mm camcorder. With the setup, I could do still shots of coins. My coin collecting friends were astounded seeing an image of a coin under a camcorder appear on a computer monitor. The picture format was PCX. GIF had just been invented; JPEG hadn’t yet been invented. I later converted the PCX pics to GIF or JPEG. The pictures are crude by today’s standards. Mike
