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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kaparthy, post: 254, member: 57463&quot;]Your enthusiasm is infectious, to be sure.&nbsp; Quibbling over details should not dampen your spirit for collecting.&nbsp; You should know, of course, that gushing and gollying aside, some of the things that draw you to this coin may not be exactly as you believe them.</p><p><br /></p><p>For instance, you said: &quot;Athenian Owls were the world&#039;s first widely used international coinage.&quot; But I would look to the Persian sigloi and darics and perhaps even Kyzikene staters to also be &quot;widely used&quot; and &quot;international.&quot;&nbsp; Of course, Owls were, too.&nbsp; And that is my point: &quot;too.&quot;&nbsp; There were other coins.&nbsp; As coinage spread across the Mediterranean, it got more and more popular and if you could say that the Owl was MORE international and MORE widely used than darics and sigloi, then someone could say, &quot;Wait, there was nothing to compare to the Roman imperial denarius, which was the first international widely used coinage.&quot;&nbsp; And so on.</p><p><br /></p><p>And you said: &quot;Minting began in the 6th century BC and continued without debasement though various design evolutions for half a millennium...&quot;</p><p>Except for the mintiing of &quot;copper Owls&quot; the perhaps silverplated emergency coins of (arguably) 413-404, it is true that when they were made of silver, the Owls were nominally pure silver.&nbsp;&nbsp; That is true.&nbsp; However, there were gaps of decades between changes in style, the most dramatic of which is the New Style (so-called) whose dating is still not certain, but accepted beginng perhaps 150 or perhaps 120 BC.&nbsp; So, the point is that while silver Owls were silver, Owls were not continuously struck for half a millennium.&nbsp; And more to the point, given what a fouree is, the silver plated Owls were greatly debased.&nbsp; And as I contend, these emergency coins were copper Owls, a tremedous debasement of the currency.</p><p><br /></p><p>Those are the numismatic points.&nbsp; The agoric issues are more serious and might indeed halt one&#039;s rush to acquire.&nbsp; You said: &quot;... I bought through eBay from a guy in Lebanon infamous for his misattributions, halting English, and occasionally really good buys.&quot;&nbsp;&nbsp; You might want to have this coin authenticated by ICG or David Sear or someone.&nbsp; It seems to me all too easy to sell fakes from overseas via eBay.&nbsp; You can handle enough Roman denarii or enough Athenian Owls even to have some confidence.&nbsp; How many Sabean Owls have you smelt?&nbsp; With machine tool technology today and the poverty in the middle east, I would hesitate to buy anything.&nbsp; David Hendin tells a famous story of being offered coins that he must buy right now because they were also being offered to David Hendin!&nbsp; The coins, of course, were fakes.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Also, if you claim that you bought the coin for &quot;one-tenth of its market value&quot; then the phrase &quot;market value&quot; loses its meaning.&nbsp; Catalog value is one thing.&nbsp; Market value is another.&nbsp; What you paid for the coin _IS_ its market value, by definition.&nbsp; You can sell it for 10 or 30 or 100 times more than you paid for it, to be sure.&nbsp; At which point, that one coin has a different market value, which may affect the market values of other coins in its class and even of all other coins incrementally.&nbsp; But market value is by definition what you paid for the coin and what you have said is that this coin&#039;s market value is only one-tenth of its catalog value.</p><p><br /></p><p>Then, you seem to lose your sense of historical perspective: &quot;But here&#039;s the really interesting part. Saba is referred to as Sheba in the Old Testament, as in the Queen of Sheba ...&quot;&nbsp; But that was 930 BC and this coin is from 400 BC or later.&nbsp; (Do you have an attribution for the date?)&nbsp; So, that is like getting an English shilling from 1950 and talking about the War of the Roses.</p><p><br /></p><p>You close with: &quot;This led to the Golden Age of U.S. coins and the Saint, Walker, Standing Liberty quarter, the three most classical, and beautiful, of U.S. coins.&quot;&nbsp; First of all, there is a question about the &quot;most&quot; classical of US coins, since ALL US Coins are &quot;classical&quot; (rather, neo-classical) by definition.&nbsp;&nbsp; Except for being debased now, you could take a Large Cent or a Lincoln Cent, a Seater, Barber, Mercury or Roosevelt Dime, a Kennedy or Franklin Half and so on&nbsp; and so on, to the street of ancient Rome and no one would bat an eyelash. &quot;E Pluribus Unum... Liberty... United States...&quot; Even &quot;America&quot; is a Latinized word.&nbsp; The guy on one side, the Eagle or Building with Columns, or Oak Leaves or Fasces or whatever, all US Coins are classical.&nbsp; And as for the Walking Libery Half, it is a direct adaptation of the French franc by Oscar Roty.&nbsp; I grant that Roty&#039;s &quot;Semeuse&quot; and Weinman&#039;s Walking Liberty have ancient precedents in coins of a walking goddess with something in her arms such as a cornucopia, or even the &quot;angel with cross&quot; or &quot;Nike with Stylos&quot; coins of Alexander.</p><p><br /></p><p>Again, your enthusiasm is untrammeled, I hope.&nbsp; But I also hope that you spend more time reading history books.&nbsp; You will enjoy your coins more.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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