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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 5365427, member: 110350&quot;]I&#039;ve never encountered skepticism about the authenticity of my ancient coins from the relatively few people I&#039;ve told I collect them. After all, most people I know have seen them in museums. Instead, the common reaction is&nbsp; surprise at how plentiful and relatively inexpensive they can be. </p><p><br /></p><p>The greater problem is complete lack of interest! Even my son, who&#039;s an Art History PhD student and has certainly studied the art of the ancient world (although it&#039;s far from his field), shows mild interest at best. And the interest from most people was no greater when the focus of my collecting was British coins and historical medals.</p><p><br /></p><p>At least my son doesn&#039;t usually get that glassy-eyed look we&#039;re all familiar with when I mention ancient coins, but I know enough to keep those mentions brief, even with him. He finds my antiquities far more interesting, and has since he was a small child and used to get very excited about our having our own museum. (Ironically, most people who are in my home and see the antiquities -- which are on display much more prominently than the coins -- assume that they&#039;re replicas. Frankly, I&#039;m just as happy to have people make that assumption unless I know them well.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I believe that a big reason most people, including my son, show such little interest in ancient coins is the same basic reason that coin exhibits always get much less attention, and sparser crowds, in art museums than other ancient art.&nbsp; It&#039;s that they&#039;re mostly (unless they&#039;re made of gold) so small and unprepossessing, even if they&#039;re fairly large silver coins and even if they&#039;re sitting in a tray or on a wall at a museum, compared to bigger and more spectacular ancient art like statues, mosaics, figural vases, etc. It&#039;s easy to pass them by, and you really have to examine them closely and under magnification in order to appreciate them. And who has time for that?</p><p><br /></p><p>After all, the images of ancient coins we exchange and admire are mostly highly magnified. If all we could exchange were life-sized images of coins, and we couldn&#039;t enlarge them or zoom in on them, I think this forum would be a lot less fun even for us, and we&#039;re interested in the subject. </p><p><br /></p><p>The general lack of interest doesn&#039;t really bother me, though. At least collecting ancient coins isn&#039;t considered really weird by most people, like adults collecting Star Wars toys or superhero comic books or baseball cards, all of which were originally intended for children. Besides, the fewer people who have an interest in ancient coins, the more of them are left for us!&nbsp; And at least we have one place to talk about them.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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