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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Nerva, post: 3044431, member: 87761&quot;][ATTACH=full]760448[/ATTACH] </p><p>Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother William Herbert Hunt were the &#039;Cleos&#039; of the 1970s and 1980s, paying high prices for the best ancient coins on the market. They collected in slightly different areas; William collected Byzantine coins and ancient bronzes, and Nelson collected Greek and Roman coins and Greek vases. They were among the wealthiest people in the world, until they lost almost everything trying to corner the silver market. It&#039;s a stunning story of hubris and nemesis. In the early 1990s their stunning collections were sold in a series of auctions at Sotheby&#039;s. </p><p><br /></p><p>The sumptuous catalogs are good reference works, with introductions by David Sellwood and E.E. Clain-Stefanelli, but mainly they&#039;re just to drool over. It&#039;s hard to get a sense of their taste, beyond a desire for the BEST: *all* the decadrachms are here, plus the classic Greek rarities, and lots of big gold multiples. For those with a taste for antiquities, they had TWO vases by Euphronios! </p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve been buying the catalogs piecemeal and I&#039;ve got most of them now. A couple seem to have belonged to a journalist covering the sale, judging by the notes. He even sketched some of the bidders.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH]760463[/ATTACH]</p><p>And noted that some coins had become less valuable following discoveries:</p><p>[ATTACH]760465[/ATTACH] </p><p>And here is one of the highlights, a forward-facing bust of Maxentius.</p><p>[ATTACH]760466[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Anyone got any Hunt-provenanced coins?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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