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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Justin Lee, post: 4817654, member: 87404&quot;]I&#039;m not actually surprised... I would&#039;ve been surprised if it were silver colored. With it being an Alexandrian tetradrachm, it&#039;s actually billion, a low percentage of silver with bronze. Progressively the percentage of silver got lower and lower. Also some individual batches can fluctuate in that mixture a little bit (or how &quot;mixed&quot; the metals were within the coin). Up until Antoninus Pius, they had a more silver appearance:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1167408[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>By Marcus Aurelius, they seem to lessen in that silver appearance with a lower silver content and more grey appearance (mostly early reign) and some bronze or black toned appearance for some as well (you can see some specks of silver on the surface, not being very homogenous metals):</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1167409[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Commodus struck many tetradrachms in large numbers, the sizes shrunk a tad, and the silver content seems to deminish a tad as well. Most will be black toned or dark brown toned, and more rarely mottled grey in appearance. I&#039;m sure you saw that in your research.</p><p><br /></p><p>A good paper to read on the subject is <i>Coinage and the Roman Economy in the Antonine Period: the view from Egypt </i>(<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d675/853340f9765aa0ff305ab52713d597142114.pdf&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiq3drn_8LrAhXCXc0KHY4WArk4ChAWMAF6BAgJEAE&amp;usg=AOvVaw3khcBwqLAiq-Ll4kxEStmg" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d675/853340f9765aa0ff305ab52713d597142114.pdf&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiq3drn_8LrAhXCXc0KHY4WArk4ChAWMAF6BAgJEAE&amp;usg=AOvVaw3khcBwqLAiq-Ll4kxEStmg" rel="nofollow">link to pdf</a>) by a great line-up of expert authors, Howgego, Butcher, Ponting, and Heuchert.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is a table illustrating the decline of silver content of the period in comparison to the fineness of the Imperial denarii:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1167421[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>And it really is a bummer that the seller&#039;s photos were not true-to-life in hand. He must&#039;ve left them that way or did it intentionally as to show the detail of the coin, as dark toned coins typically are hard to shoot and maintain fine details. Who really knows... <b><i>I feel for ya, man! <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie87" alt=":sorry:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></i></b>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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