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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 25449208, member: 128351&quot;][ATTACH=full]1628898[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1628903[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1628904[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1628906[/ATTACH]</p><p>These coins of the « Gallic Empire » of the 260s were a shock for me when I was a child.</p><p><br /></p><p>I don’t know why my dad kept a handful of 20 bronze antoniniani in a drawer. He did not collect coins. One day, looking for something, I discovered them and asked him what it was. He told me they were Roman « small bronzes », and that I could have them if I liked. I was enthusiastic : actual authentic genuine ancient coins ! Roman coins !</p><p><br /></p><p>I tried to decipher the legends, and found the names of Gallienus, Salonina, Claudius, Postumus, Victorinus, Tetricus… But who were they ? I had never heard about them, I only knew the names of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Trajan… In some book I found Gallienus, a late emperor of the decadent empire, but nothing about the other ones. I showed the coins at school to my teacher, who just told me : « These are portraits, you know… ». The guy was not a collector, and not an historian.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1628907[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>It was not easy fot a child, back in the days before Wikipedia existed, to find who people like Postumus or Tetricus had been. Finally I could find it and for me it was a discovery : Postumus, Victorinus, Tetricus, had been emperors of a « Gallic Empire » in the 3rd century ! At some moment Roman Gaul had been an independent state, another smaller empire…</p><p><br /></p><p>At school, history lessons never mentioned this. In France we heared about the Gauls, the invasion by Julius Caesar, the heroic Vercingetorix, and after that Gaul becoming « Roman Gaul » with a lot of cities, roads, bridges… But it seemed that nothing worthy to be told had happened before the « Barbarian invasions » and the Franks changing the name of the country for « France ».</p><p><br /></p><p>For a kid like me, these coins I had in my hand were evidence of an untold history of my own country. 5 centuries, half a millenium of dark ages… Of course, I later learned that these « Gallic emperors » were common knowledge for historians and scholars, but ignored by textbooks and mainsteam literature, the kind a kid can find. These coins have been the best and probably most interesting history lesson I ever learned : real history lies in documents, not textbooks who select a limited range of topics.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1628908[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1628909[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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