Roman Republic: silver denarius of moneyer L. Furius Brocchus; Ceres and curule chair, ca. 63 BC

Roman Republic: silver denarius of moneyer L. Furius Brocchus, ca. 63 BC

Obverse: III VIR BROCCHI, bust of Ceres right, between wheat ear and barley corn.
Reverse: L FVRI C N F, curule chair between fasces.
Issuer: Roman Republic.
Specifications: silver, 18 mm, 3.9 g,
Grade: NGC Ch VF; Strike 5/5, Surface 4/5, cert. #4166941-005. Purchased raw.
Reference attribution: Rome mint, Crawford 414/1; Sydenham 902a; Furia 23a-365.*.
Provenance: ex-Joseph Mastrario, DBA Imperator Coins, Macon, Georgia, USA, 27 October 2014. Prior provenance to CNG eAuction 296, Lot 219, 13 February 2013, cited there as "ex-Chiltern collection".*
Notes: A handsome coin with attractive style and old cabinet toning which is not entirely apparent in the photographs. It appears this might have been overstruck on an earlier coin, since there are ghostly features in the blank fields around the curule chair on the reverse, but the undertype, if there was one, is too indistinct to determine. There also seems to be a die chip or other feature on the underside of Ceres' nose.
Comments: I liked this design for the portrait, and the coin for its pastel toning.



030800S

 

There was an earlier (2016) thread about this coin, but it was easier to create a new one than to retool the old one to my new format.

Feel free to post your similar coins if you like.

 

Thanks.

Maybe I've spent just a few too many years around people who obsess over the minute difference between a 66 and a 67 on the label of a plastic slab (to the point where they then began obsessing so much that someone created a company to grade the grading and add stickers to the slabs. Now I'm waiting for someone to add stickers to the stickers, thereby third-guessing the second-guessers.)

Where was I?

Off on another rambling tangent, that's where.

Oh, yeah. So anyway, what I was getting at was that after spending so much time with nitpicky numismatic perfectionists, I once might not have understood what you meant about "just the right amount of wear".

But I do. I totally do. That's definitely a thing.

I think your avatar is another example of that.

 

Geez, @TIF, give a fella some time! Did you read Post #2?

It's taken me two days just to get this far, and I've got another couple dozen writeups to catch up on. Nearly two years worth of purchases.

Whatsamatter with posting an utterly unscientific poll, for fun? I rather like doing that, as you may have noticed.

And just because I enjoy polling other people's responses doesn't mean I'm incapable of forming my own feelings about a coin, as you seem to imply. And don't think that the retooling of these subthreads has anything to do with the polls. Those just appear at the top of the page by default. I only decided to start adding them this morning. There were more important reasons behind my reformatting.

As to my detecting stories, those were easier to write because I usually had firsthand knowledge of what I was talking about. With ancient and medieval coins, such confidence in my own scholarship is not a given. Detailed writeups take time and thought. Sure, I'm enthusiastic, and I know a little bit about them - even enough to string together a semi-coherent sentence or two - but I often start from a much less educated position with an ancient or medieval coin purchase. I buy based more on gut intuition and aesthetic appeal, then learn the finer points later. This makes doing writeups difficult at first.

Once I get caught up with the writeups, I intend to make Post #2 in these writeup threads just the sort of thing you're suggesting: the personal commentary. Maybe a paragraph about a coin's history and then a rundown of some "pro & con" bullet points, like the Antique Sage site does.

 

What's there to be "distressed" about? By all means, feel free to PM me if you're distressed about something.

 

My intention here is to create subthreads (individual coin writeups) for all the coins that lack them, to link to from my periodic Eclectic Box updates.

I intended to complete the basic factual OPs (Post #1 in each subthread) before composing my thoughts and going back to write a paragraph (or two, given my bloated style) about each coin's basic history, and then a few pros and cons about the coin. That's why I've put that temporary "Round TUIT" statement in Post #2 of these writeups.

Tell y'all what - I'll go back and complete those secondary posts for all the ancient and medieval coins before I go on to post the rest of the World coins (in the World Coins Forum).

And I'm done with the ancients now. I completed that in a flurry, because I had a block of time available to do so. My apologies if they "cluttered up" or "flooded" the forum briefly. They will disperse and sink in due time. Think of it as the flooding of the Nile- a once-yearly (or scarcer) event.

Sorry too if my predilection for lighthearted, semiserious polls has rubbed anyone else the wrong way.

Would a website be better than my byzantine, Rube Goldberg-esque system of interlaced message board threads? Maybe. Probably. But it would also require me to surmount another learning curve and might not get any traffic or response. Do I crave that attention? Of course I do. Is that so wrong? I've been thinking about it, though. I'll bet the templates for website building are probably much easier than they were the last time I looked into that.

 

Thank you for that. I needed to hear that just now.

 

While ruminating over what an "FTP program" might possibly be, the best I could come up with was that FTP = "FEL TEMP PEPPERONI", which implies that either I've been hanging around you ancient coin peeps too long, or I'm just hungry. Maybe both.

To the fridge I go. There would be a real Fel Temp in the Old Town Tonight if there was some pepperoni in there, but I suspect not. And since that's usually reserved for Victoria's school lunch, I'm not allowed to touch it anyway.

Oh! I've got it! An FTP server is a server who brings you your Fel Temp Pepperoni?

Preferably on top of a pizza.

And then a Fel Temp is had by all.