Featured When the horseman wins

Great coins.
I bought an unclean Magnentius, and impatiently waiting for it to look after cleaning.

 

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Love this thread. The Falling Horseman - is that a particularly rare coin? I haven't actually seen one for sale anywhere.

 

They are extremely common.

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/uncleaned.html

 

I've seen a lot of them falling to the left. Perhaps to the right is less common? Maybe not! I do really like them

 

I didn't consider the context of your first question when I answered. The coin Doug showed in the first post is not the type commonly called "falling horseman" . It is another type of late Roman bronze which at a glance looks similar and I've made this mistake too (including very recently ).

The "falling horseman" type of FEL TEMPS coin shows an unmounted Roman soldier about to spear a barbarian who has fallen from his horse. The coin that led this post, and others in the thread, show a Roman soldier mounted on a horse, about to spear an unmounted barbarian; the reverse legend is GLORIA ROMANORVM, although there are some of this reverse iconography which have the FEL TEMPS legend (see lrbguy's post in this thread). In general, all of these are common but of course there are some variations which are uncommon.

@randygeki is the CoinTalk King of Falling Horseman coins. Hey Randy, wanna give Darren some guidance?

 

Aah that will be why then! Thanks for the insight TIF, awesome.

 

Perhaps this is a good place to point out a problem with the terms rare and common as they apply to ancient coins. Taken as a whole the Falling Horsemen are about as common as any ancient coin but there are 2200+ acknowledged varieties of which some exist by the thousands and others are hard to find even with a lot of looking. That 2200+ number (from Dane of Wildwinds) took into account mints and officina as well as the major pose variations (FH1, FH2, FH3 and FH4) but real specialists like our Randy keep finding other little things like a shield with a swirl design that will raise that number. The question is what YOU define as a big enough difference to make a difference. Below are five coins. Some here would never want even one of them because none are mint state. Some would see four of them being duplicates of the FH3 'Reaching' pose so would not want more than one of those four. Some would see one different enough due to the obverse being ulike the other four. A few would love to have the set and recognize each as collectible. None are wrong in their opinions but the coins below are either five of the same, most common Roman coins or five very different coins (only one of which is common) just depending on whom you ask.


I just realized I do not own a Constans FH3. If I did, I would have posted it here but now I guess there is a new want list item. This list can get expensive.

 

(Responding to Doug's post above - forgot to insert the quote and now can't figure out how to add it after posting...)

If you laid them all out on a table and told someone new to these to pick one to keep.... 9 out of 10 would choose the Antioch coin (4th one down). Although it's a great looking coin, it is the last one that I would choose.

 

Not sure if I need to add anymore other than more pics The Fallen horseman coins are way more common than the emperor on horseback, but with a lot of rarities mixed in.

Fallen (falling) horseman



Emperor on Horseback

I'd like to have them all but yeah that's the one to pilfer.