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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 3984944, member: 19463&quot;]Thank you for this link.&nbsp; It answers many questions about how your rarity ratings came to be.&nbsp; A couple things in the red letter addendum at the end seem particularly interesting.&nbsp; Coins sold in lots of more than one coin and sales under $5 were excluded.&nbsp; This would seem to have an inordinate effect on coins of Constantine (mostly AE3) compared to coins of, for example, Trajan who produced higher priced silver and large bronzes.&nbsp; A few years ago, CNG sold several large lots in their sales each with 100 very high grade folles of Constantine.&nbsp; I suppose this has little effect on numbers as high as we see here but these lots were not the first time large groups of late Romans were traded but I doubt anyone has ever sold a bulk lot of a hundred denarii of Otho, Didius Julianus etc.&nbsp; I did not include Pertinax here because I wonder if there was not a sale of the finds that brought all his Alexandria mint denarii to market but these would not have been cataloged auctions that would show in such a survey.&nbsp; This, of course, raises the question of how many coins are sold by &#039;private treaty&#039; as opposed to cataloged auction.&nbsp; Surveying the wares of European flea markets over that same century is a study that can not happen.&nbsp; Would the results change the numbers? </p><p><br /></p><p>What it comes down to is that statistics lie like politicians.&nbsp; Our job in both cases is to discern which ones are real as opposed to which ones &#039;prove&#039; a decision already made by whoever commissioned the study.&nbsp; Still, there remains the fact that it makes no difference how many coins exist but how hard it will be to find one if you want it.&nbsp; Back in the days when relatively few coins were illustrated in sale catalogs, it was easier to find described and photographed coins of any ruler from 193 AD other than Septimius Severus whose coins had to be special in some way to make the sale.&nbsp; That does not mean that Pertinax and Didius are more common than Septimius but just more likely to be listed separately and fully described as to reverse type.&nbsp; Without photos, it was not always easy to know if a coin for sale in several auctions was the same specimen remarketed or different.</p><p><br /></p><p>I appreciate the hard work Ras put into the rarity ratings but will never be convinced that the results can be accepted without applying factors addressing errors introduced in many ways.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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