It started with the coin below which I could get my greedy hands on: For a coin of our most famous of all gladiator-emperors (ha ha), this one really hit me because of its elegant portrait, soft toning and, despite its relatively limited relief, very bold appearance. It maybe also has to do with the flow lines that radiate outwards from the portrait and - so to say - suck you in. In hand it is even better! A real masterpiece in my opinion (at least in my price range that is!), and luckily underappreciated in the auction (many have a different definition of masterpiece ;-)) In any case, this coin, and inspired by the beautiful posters of @Deacon Ray, decided me to update my digital tray of the adoptive / antonine - emperors (although I'm nowhere near his skills ). It's also a lot of fun playing around with your coins in this manner. Enough with the blabla; show your coins of commodus, and/or, other adoptive/antonine - emperors and/or digital tray!
How about a Nerva, the first of the "good emperors" My Nerva from Alexandria... Type: Billon Tetradrachm, 25mm, 12.7 grams, mint of Alexandria year 96-97 A.D. Obverse: Bust of Nerva facing right, KAIS SEB AVT NEPOVAS Reverse: Agathodaemon serpent coiled with head right, holding caduceus and grain ear within coils, wearing the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. In exergue, LA. Reference: Milne 542, Dattari 638 (rare)
Amazing coins - just a beautiful set!!... Here is my set .. in bronze and certainly of lower grade. But happy to own them.
Hmmm ... which Commodus haven't I posted in a while? Commodus, AD 177-192. Roman AR denarius, 2.29 g, 17.2 mm, 7 h. Rome, AD 191. Obv: M COMM ANT P FEL AVG BRIT P P, laureate head, right. Rev: CONC COM P M TR P XVI COS VI, Concordia standing left, holding patera and scepter. Refs: RIC 219; BMCRE 296-97; RCV 5631; MIR 808; Cohen 45. It doesn't look that good, but few of Commodus' late-reign denarii do. The cool thing is that it happens to be a reverse die match to the specimen in the British Museum:
Nice coins! I've been reorganising my coins a bit, both physically and virtually - I had more than a year's worth of purchases to put into trays and am getting through them. My Roman Republican coins (about 700 at the moment), are mostly in a pile of Abafil trays and stored online on Tantalus. I've got a long list on a webpage (which needs some updating), ordered by Crawford numbers, which links to the Tantalus data. I'm very slowly working on a database which will improve selection/sorting, but it's not currently operational. I bought some books on MySQL and PHP in about 2008 and have periodically attacked it - maybe if this lockdown continues into the summer... Anyway, last weekend, I got to arranging the the first batch of Roman post-Republican coins (Augustus) and put most of them into a tray (6 x 9). There's also a tray of earlier ones, which made it into Crawford and so are in the RR section and I have a couple more Augustus coins which will join them. Anyway, I took a photo' of the tray and made an imagemap to link the pics to Tantalus data. My photos are mostly very bad for these and the pic of the tray is too large, so it may work better if you zoom out on the web page to see it all, or you'll have to scroll around: http://coins.uggool.net/trays/Augustus_tray.html I can autogenerate imagemaps if I take a standard size of photograph of each tray - e.g. using a copystand - and record the position of each coin in the database. In this case, the same imagemap code is used for each tray, with just the links being updated. Alternatively, I could dice up the pictures into a grid of 6x9 (or 7x11 for the RR silver) images and have a mouseover for each one which brought up some information and a click could bring you to the page for each coin. Or generate a virtual coin tray on-demand, which would update itself automagically with each new addition. Of course, at my rate of progress, the lockdown will have to continue for the rest of the roaring twenties if I'm to get this done ATB, Aidan.
Super Set, @Limes! WOW, NICE! I have multiples of these Emperors. I have yet to join mine into a single set, but here are some of mine as a Rag-Tag assembly (JUST to make it a fun denominations variety): NERVA RI Nerva AE Dupondius 96-98 CE LIBERTAS PVBLICA -pileus Ex: @TIF TRAJAN RI Trajan Egypt AE Dichalkon Laureate hd L Rhinoceros walking L LI-Z yr 17 CE 113-114 12.9mm 1.25g Emmet 719 var. rhino right Ex: SteveX6 HADRIAN How 'bout a LIMES! (And for you Modern collectors out there, the Seller is HOLDING IT IN HIS HAND!!! ) RI Hadrian, AD 117-138 Æ Limes Denarius 18mm 3.5mm after AD 125 Genius stndg sacrificing altar cornucopia RIC II 173 Ex: @John Anthony AELIUS RI Aelius Caesar 138 CE AE As 26mm Rome mint Fortuna-Spes cornucopia and rudder ANTONINUS PIUS RI Antoninus Pius 138-161 CE BI Tet Alexandria Egypt Dikaiosyne Scale MARCUS AURELIUS RI MARCUS AURELIUS AR Den as Caesar TR POT VI COS II - Genius stg at altar hldg standard LUCIUS VERUS RI LUCIUS VERUS 161-169 AE24 As Rome L VERVS AVG ARMENIACVS Bare head r Mars trophy TR P IIII IMP II COS II S-C RIC 1377 COMMODUS RI Commodus 177-192 CE AR Denarius 17.7mm 2.42g Apollo Plectrum Lyre RIC 218 RSC 25 BMCRE 292 Rare Type
Oh! @Andres2 , I like the 6 BAD Creatures... CREATURE-FEATURE TIBERIUS RI Tiberius AE As 14-37 CE Laureate-Pont Max Globe Rudder sinister left RIC I 58 CALIGULA RI Gaius Caligula AE As 37-41 CE Vesta seated S-C Sinister Left NERO RI Poppea-Nero BI tetradrachm of Alexandria LI yr10 63-64 CE Milne 217 RPC 5275 COMMODUS RI Commodus 177-192 CE AR Denarius laureate hd and Hercules and Africa CARACALA RI Caracalla 198-217 AR Quinarius CE 213 1.3g 13.6mm Laureate - Victory Wreath Palm RIC IV 101 RSC 450 RARE ELAGABALUS RProv AE18mm 4.3g Elagabalus CE 218-222 Thrace Philippolis Moushmov 5423
I don't have an Aelius denarius so I'll opt for the 'show your Commodus' idea. As Caesar Young Augustus My favorite mid-period portrait as Hercules Barbarous copy in good silver Alexandria mint denarius Alexandria tetradrachm /Nilus bust Caesarea didrachm Finally is a strange favorite of mine: AE19 2 assaria from Dionysopolis with Herakles reverse and blue patina. The B denominaton mark is retrograde making it look right as the bow of Herakles. Accident??? I really wanted the obverse die link to this coin in the last FSR sale (different reverse) but someone wanted it a lot more than I did.