Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Carausius, post: 2808460, member: 76440&quot;]I love it when circumstances align and yield a great old provenance! Last January, I bought this attractive Brutus AR Denarius&nbsp; with beautiful old collection toning&nbsp; on the NYINC bourse floor.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]656463[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Roman Imperatorial</p><p>Caepio Brutus, 43-2 BC</p><p>AR Denarius (3.76 g; 21 mm)</p><p>Mint traveling with Brutus</p><p>Obv: LEIBERTAS, Liberty head r.</p><p>Rev: CAEPIO BRVTVS PRO COS, Lyre with quiver and filleted olive branch.</p><p>Crawford 501/1; HCRI 199</p><p><br /></p><p>Coin looks like it hasn&#039;t been touched in 100 years, right?...well...</p><p><br /></p><p>Yesterday, I received a book that I won in the last Kolbe &amp; Fanning auction: Smyth, William, <i>Descriptive Catalogue of A Cabinet of Roman Family Coins Belonging to His Grace the Duke of Northumberland</i> (1856). The Smyth book has no plates (line drawn or otherwise), but does contain detailed descriptions of the collection coins with weights in grains.&nbsp; The Duke&#039;s collection would be sold 125 years later by Sotheby&#039;s.</p><p><br /></p><p>After work today, I felt compelled to pull that old&nbsp; Sotheby&#039;s auction catalogue from my shelf.&nbsp; I&#039;d not reviewed the plates in detail in some time.&nbsp; My eyes were drawn to this familiar flan shape and strike:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]656469[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>They look a match, but oddly, the Sotheby&#039;s catalogue (1982) doesn&#039;t give weights for the silver. So, I went to the Smyth book, where I found the coin description with weight in grains.&nbsp; A quick calculation confirmed the weight to within a few 100ths of a gram of my coin. Finding the coin in Sotheby&#039;s and then Smyth takes the provenance back to pre-1856! This is certainly my oldest verifiable provenance to date.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in