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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lehmansterms, post: 2713043, member: 80804&quot;]Ah yes, I remember it well... </p><p>It was right after Sputnik I, so I was 8 in 1957, and that&#039;s when my somewhat disreputable Uncle Lester gave me a Christmas present of an assorted handful of ancient coins.&nbsp; No one in the family was too keen on asking him exactly where he got them. I had been accumulating &quot;collections&quot; of damn near anything else I could drag home from about the time I could walk - including, at around age 4 or 5, US coins. This was approximately the age awareness dawned that &quot;pennies have dates!&quot;, etc. Those first few ancients made for some serious bragging rights when all the coin-collecting neighborhood kids (and it seems like almost everyone collected coins &amp; stamps, etc, at the time) got together to compare and trade. My Roman coins sort of blew everyone else out of the water. This lasted until the neighborhood consensus came around to saying &quot;those don&#039;t count!&quot;. So obscurity and ignorance won out for the time being. Due to lack of access to useful information about them or knowledge about any way to add to the group, they were tucked away in a little jewelry box at the bottom of the box I kept my coins in. </p><p>Several years passed (before, as a teenager, I became too cool to collect coins,) as I continued to add to my US &amp; World &quot;holdings&quot;.&nbsp; Although the collection was eventually put aside (seems like many of us temporarily abandoned the pursuit during our hormone-drenched teens) it was neither lost nor completely forgotten, and all through college &amp; young adulthood I always seemed to have a little bowl of some sort in which I kept any oddball coins which crossed my path. Few of those actually made it back to the &quot;master collection&quot; in my parents&#039; attic and so I guess I wasn&#039;t &quot;really&quot; collecting at the time. Around &#039;72 or &#039;73, I rescued the old collection from my parents&#039; closet so I could stash it in my own closet. Soon thereafter, however, I stumbled upon a pretty little CONSTANTINOPOLIS commemorative which reminded me of my Weird Uncle Lester and the ancient coins. They ignited intellectual interest in a way the others had never quite done. Finally I managed to make contact with folks who knew about and collected ancients, and what has proved to be an inextinguishable fuse was lit.</p><p>That&#039;s a gross total of about 60 years, and about 45 of more serious concentration and specialization in ancients.</p><p>So much else has been lost or had for various reasons to be abandoned along that road, but somehow I still have those original 6 coins from 1957:</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.stoa.org/albums/album93/ML21_Faustina_I_Augusta_as.sized.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p>Faustina Sr. posthumous dupondius</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.stoa.org/albums/album100/ML_22_Gord_III_Apollo_as_ed.sized.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p>Gordian III as</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.stoa.org/albums/album306/31_Philip_I_tet_Elpis.sized.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p>Philip Sr. Alexandrian tetradrachm</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.stoa.org/albums/album110/ML_01_Tetricus_I_Comes_ant1.sized.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p>Tetricus Sr. Gallic Empire antoninianus</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.stoa.org/albums/album110/ML_12_Tetricus_II_Pax_ant.sized.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p>Tetricus Jr. Gallic Empire antoninianus</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.stoa.org/albums/album306/41_Tacitus_Dikaiosyne.sized.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p>Tacitus Alexandrian tetradrachm</p><p><br /></p><p>And finally, the CONSTANTINOPOLIS which really set me on the road in about &#039;73:</p><p><img src="http://www.stoa.org/albums/album165/58_Cpls_TRE_b.sized.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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