Public Domain Literature

Hello everyone, in my quest to save myself money in order to have more for coins (and college tuition) I have turned to the public domain. I have found a few books online that are free to download, completely legally, and I have started to use these quench my thirst for knowledge of ancient Rome. I have downloaded a book about Antoninus Pius, one about Probus, and one about Roman Numismatics in general. They're pretty old, but I think especially being so new to ancient coins, that they'll be a good resource. The one I'm starting with is "The Reign of Antoninus Pius" by E.E Bryant, published in 1895. I'm going to see if I can find some about other strong emperors like Trajan and Marcus Aurelius as well, because I much prefer to learn about the emperors that made Rome strong to those who made Rome fall. If any of you have any good public domain literature to recommend or otherwise anything to add to the discussion, I'd appreciate it!

 

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Many of the British Museum catalogues (all but 1 or 2 of the 29 in the Greek series, for example) are pre-copyright and available at sites like books.google.com and archive.org. Dumbarton Oaks recently uploaded their multi-volume catalogue of Byzantine coins to archive.org. By special arrangement, you can find all but the most recent American Numismatic Society publications as free downloads at hathitrust.org. The current 3rd edition of Steve Album's Checklist of Islamic Coins, the standard reference for the series, is now available as a free pdf download at the author's website.

These are only 'the tip of the iceberg', as they say...

 

Not a book, but a very large site with extensive histories of Roman Emperors and their family members. A very informative site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210921115830/http://www.roman-emperors.org/alphin.htm#t-inx

 

Check out the Newman Numismatic Portal: https://nnp.wustl.edu/

Thousands of books, journals, periodicals, auction catalogs, etc. I'm sure you can find a thing or two on there to keep you occupied.

 

Thanks for this! This'll have to be my go-to resource, much more efficient than downloading a book for every emperor.

 

Here's a "Book" that I put together for friends to use as a guide to my coin collection. It doesn't go into the nitty-gritty detail that a proper book on a specific emperor would go into, but I think that it gives a convenient, chronological, overview of Roman history and the emperors.

I focus on the entertaining stuff (horrific stories (rumors, falsehoods), murders, and bad qualities), but there is a lot of useful information in there, IMO. It covers Julius Caesar through Theodosius' sons:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Io7MZ262_b0_L91gEd1LB2v1Ici0czkm/view?usp=sharing