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Message:: [QUOTE="kaparthy, post: 3278572, member: 57463"]Allow me to add my voice. I came to collecting late in life. I have been a hard money advocate since I was a teen, but I never got into the numismatic value in bullion coins until much later. (More on that in a different thread.) I dabbled at US classic coins, but it was clear that they were modeled on Greek and Roman archetypes. Two  events brought me to ancients: I discovered that they cost no more and often less than US coins of comparable collectibility; and I watched an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, "Backbone of the Night" about the Greek philosophers.  I assembled a set of about 50 Ancient Greek coins worth a day's wages from the towns and times of philosophers from Thales of Miletos to Hypatia of Alexandria. I fell out of collecting per se back in 2000, but as an active writer, I still buy, usually with a mind to write an article, whether than happens or not. For me, it is the research and reporting that makes numismatics interesting. With US coins, no one really cares about the history. No one buys a Seated Quarter because of the Missouri Compromise -- not many, anyway... I would...  With ancients, as compelling as some examples can be, like Al Kowsky's Volusian, if you don't know who Volusian was, it is just another shiny coin, and the world has no shortage of those. So, for me, it is all about the history, and hence the ancients.[/QUOTE]