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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Finn235, post: 4670561, member: 98035&quot;]Funny, I was thinking on this and even took a photo of this same conundrum.</p><p><br /></p><p>I have two passions when it comes to ancient coins - Roman Imperial, and Indo Sassanian. I spent a large amount of money earlier this year to further both sides of the hobby. In this photo, the left pile and right pile cost me about the same, dollar wise:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1151297[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Left is about 70 of the earliest Gadhaiya Paisa family - I call them series 1.1 - bought wholesale from a hoard at $10 each. They are mind-numbingly diverse, mostly scarce to extremely rare, and woefully under-studied and misunderstood. I just recently got them sorted out and placed into my larger collection, but I have many enjoyable hours ahead of me to truly study them.</p><p><br /></p><p>On the right is a denarius of Pescennius Niger, a man of immense historical and numismatic interest, but in the grand scheme of Rome&#039;s ~500 years as the Mediterranean&#039;s premier military and economic power, he was little more than a blip. But, in its own way, I find it fascinating to hold a coin of a failed usurper or ephemeral nobody realizing that in the moment that hot denarius was pulled off of the anvil, the man whose face it portrays had aspirations to become the next Trajan or Marcus Aurelius, and it seemed well within his grasp to do so - because he had not yet failed to rally the provinces against Severus, and had no idea that he would lose his final stand at Antioch, only to be betrayed by his formerly loyal subjects.</p><p><br /></p><p>Both groups are special in their own way, although one coin in particular is a lot harder to explain to the missus![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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