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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 2508903, member: 74282&quot;]I&#039;ve told my story a few times but here it goes. I &quot;casually&quot; collected coins all my life, grabbing interesting things out of change and things, and I even bought a mint set or two as a kid. In college I saw a thread on reddit that mentioned that you could buy ancient coins online pretty cheap and I even considered buying a few from FORVM but I was broke and full time student as well as working almost full time as a supervisor at a campus kitchen and I was saving every bit of spare money I could because I knew I&#039;d be unemployed and broke after the end of the school year, but the thought of owning a Roman coin stayed in the back of my mind.</p><p><br /></p><p>Fast forward 2 years and I&#039;d just moved to Colorado to chase a software development job at a tech company. Family was coming in to visit and I was showing them(and myself - I&#039;d only been there a month!) around the state and we happened to wonder into a cool little coin and jewelry shop in Estes Park. They had a bunch of ancients, anywhere from $20 up to $2000, and I basically just bought the first two that I liked that were within my price range, small LRB and a small Byzantine bronze, and paid something like $65 total for them. Looking back I overpaid by a factor of 5 or 10 but it was worth it, as it got me interested in coins again, and in particular, ancient coins and ancient history.</p><p><br /></p><p>I could say that was the end of it but actually, as much as I was interested in ancients, I was terrified of getting a fake after reading some things online. My local shops only had moderns(which I was more confident of buying at the time), so for 2 or 3 months I read every bit of information I could find about ancients, but I only collected moderns and very cheap uncleaned coins because in my mind I definitely wouldn&#039;t get a fake that way. During this time I think I read every single page on Doug Smith&#039;s and Warren Esty&#039;s website and read the new posts on FORVM every single day. Finally I decided to branch out and buy a cheap denarius and some small Greek silver fractionals on Vcoins. Then a few cheaper Greek and Byzantine bronzes from a guy who was a mentor of sorts for me.</p><p><br /></p><p>The next phase of my &quot;collecting career&quot; started about 5 months after I bought those first two coins. I was fortunate enough to win a nice Gordian III sestertius in a contest, at the time the best and most beautiful coin I owned by far and when I held that coin it was like the floodgates opened. I spent the night reading about Gordian III and the historical context of the &quot;Crisis of the Third Century&quot; and reading various forum discussions around the coins of this era and that was the moment it really clicked for me. It was like I&#039;d found religion, and modern coins became positively boring overnight. I started the slow process of selling off my modern coins the very next day. It took me a while because there was this nagging feeling in the back of my mind telling me that someday I&#039;d regret it, but almost two years later I don&#039;t regret it at all.</p><p><br /></p><p>The final(or at least, current) phase of my collecting career came 7 or so months later, after I&#039;d been collecting for just over a year. I was researching a coin I&#039;d bought and happened upon PDFs of Numismatica Ars Classica sales 61 and 63, the RBW collection. Reading the introductions from RBW and Roberto Russo, and then reading through the catalogs caused some sort of switch to flip in my head and even though I didn&#039;t know a lot about them, I decided I really wanted to focus on collecting Roman Republican coins and related provincial and imitative coins. I really can&#039;t explain it even today, I still find other coins interesting and very much enjoy reading the posts and seeing the coins shared by members here, but the coins in those catalogs and the history they represented spoke to me, so I decided to continue selling my moderns but to sell off all my unrelated ancients as well and put the money towards Roman Republic coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>So there you go, how I started collecting and how I arrived at where I am today.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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