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Message:: [QUOTE="GinoLR, post: 24481615, member: 128351"]Historians are pretty confident this aureus (and the similar silver denarii) was minted for Brutus and Cassius' army, which was concentrated near Philippi, a few km North of Kavala, Greece. This means it was more than probably minted there. Of course the present Republic of Greece (its official name : Helliniki Dimokratia) did not exist yet back then. But for a nation like the Greeks such a consideration is irrelevant: Greeks have existed as a people since even longer than the Jews. Their language was already written in the 14th c. BC on clay tablets found in the very places the Greeks are still living today, like Cnossos, Pylos, Mycenes, etc. Their culture and literature is older than the Bible. Of course, in 3600 years of history, they have experienced a great variety of political regimes : Bronze Age kingdoms, city-states with all the different political regimes you can figure (monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, democracies), empires, constitutional kingdom, parliamentary republic. They followed different religions too, but never stopped being Greeks, speaking Greek and feeling Greek. For them in ancient times there were two kinds of people : the Greeks and the others whom they used to call indistinctly "Barbarians", that is to say the non-Greek. I understand it may be difficult to figure for Americans whose history as a nation is just 400 years old. The Greeks have been around for 3600 years, always living on the same land as today... They always had an existential bound with this land. In Aeschylus' Persians, a tragedy that premiered in Athens in BC 472, there is a patriotic song expressing this feeling : You offspring of the Greeks, come on! Free your native home! Free your wives,your children, the temples of your father’s gods,the burial places of your ancestors!The time has come to fight for all of these! They don't fight just to defend their homes and families, they fight for "the temples of their father's gods and the burial places of their ancestors". They changed their religion since, but not their minds: today they will reclaim the pieces of the temple of Athena even if they don't believe in this goddess any more. Naturally, all antiquities from the Mycenaean, Classical and Byzantine times are assimilated to these ancestral temples and graves. The EID MAR aureus was minted in Greece and is directly linked to events that took place in Greece. It obviously did not circulate (unlike another known specimen which is holed) because it is in perfect condition. When the American police established evidence its alleged provenance was forged, they made the necessary investigations to trace its actual provenance and found enough to conclude it had been discovered in Greece (probably in a tomb, that's where isolated aurei are most often found, because there is no word of a hoard). This is obviously why they took the responsibility to handle it back to Greece. As for the buyer, a person who has been willing to pay 3,250,000.00 GBP for this coin just cannot pretend he acted naively in good faith. Nobody invests more than 3 million dollars, pounds or euros without being sure the deal is 100% clean. Everybody in the art business knows Roma Numismatics has sometimes been auctioning very rare coins with unverifiable provenances (or no provenance at all), especially coins most often found in places that are at present war zones. Either this buyer was extremely naive and his financial advisors were too, or he knew the alleged "baron Dominique de Chambrier" provenance could not be independently verified and, when 3.25 Millions are at stake, it should have been a fckng red flag. He has chosen to take the risk, he lost.[/QUOTE]

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