Featured Your coins and other people

I have only ever met one other ancient collector in person. I had the opportunity to spend an hour with Curtis Clay in the back rooms of HJB whilst I was on business in Chicago over a decade ago. This was a fleeting visit as I was on my way to the airport to head back to the UK. Curtis was a generous host and had brought in a selection of his bronzes of Septimius Severus for me to drool over. My visit was somewhat curtailed as I had just had my phone stolen from me on the streets outside the store and I was trying to retrieve it (a long and convoluted story).

I suspect that my main collection areas generally leave most collectors (including those of ancients) scratching their heads but that doesn't bother me in the slightest. I collect for myself and not for anyone else. I don't need third party validation. Things that I find interesting are generally of little or no interest to others and I am fine with this. I sometimes see something that I think will only appeal to me that then goes beyond my limited reach and I wonder who bought it and why.

I value the opportunity that communities like this give to allow me to communicate with other people who have broader knowledge of the field than I do and to see things that I would not otherwise have seen or even known existed in many cases.

I do know that sometimes my posts to a thread seem to act as a thread killer. I don't take this personally.....

 

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Sometimes what this venue needs is a good thread killer. I do wish our interests in Septimius Severus overlapped a bit better. You prefer IMP while I have always been more into COS. If I had my choice, I would really like to fill out my Alexandrian denarii but since you have been in the hobby, I feel lucky to find anything Eastern. I really do enjoy seeing all your coins. Have you ever told us how you came to be interested in the Severans?

 

I think that is the beauty of ancient coin collecting. You are not under any pressure to complete a certain series, as this is usually not possible. You can just go with your interest. My collection of Roman coins is very haphazard. I'm not so interested in the first two centuries AD, but I like the second half of the 3rd and the 4th centuries. I am very particular about condition, meaning that most of my coins are common, but are nice to look at.
My wife and children have no interest in coins whatsoever. I live in Europe and I used to go to the London coin fair regularly and I visited two other smaller coin fairs in London a lot. Since I live in Switzerland now, I try to go to the big auctions, but I'm usually outbid by the collectors with big money. It is still nice to go, because the auctions take place in fancy hotels and they sometimes offer free refreshments .
Curiously enough the only face-to-face contact that I had with a real ancient coin collector was some 20 years ago, when Warren Esty (Valentinian) visited me in London.

 

Doug,
I had drifted into ancients by accident having been collecting English silver pennies, slowly getting earlier and earlier seen a coin of Severus Alexander depicting Mars for a small fraction of what I was paying for my Cnut pennies. The fact that Mars is the root of my Christian name made this a very ego-centric purchase. I wondered, very naively, if there were any other emperors that produced coins of Mars. I stumbled across Septimius Severus from Rome and Probus from Lugdunum. I started a scatter-gun approach at this stage with very little or no knowledge whatsoever. Before I knew it I had bought about 20 or so ancients some of which I couldn't find too much information about. I have always had a nose for the "different" and wanted to learn more.

Here are the two coins in question:-

I bought this one thinking that it was Mars and soon learned to differentiate between Virtus and Mars. The fact that it was VIRVS rather than VIRTVS had also caught my eye.

This one was sold as an ancient imitation but I had been reading about the COS II issue of Septimius Severus and thought that it was an outside chance at being an odd looking but official coin. At less that $7 including international shipping it was hardly a gamble even to my novice eyes. It was worth that in the lessons to be learned alone.

There were not many online communities out there at the time but there were a couple of Yahoo groups and I shared them on there to see if someone could help.
I was a bit dis-heartened originally when I was told that such odd-ball finds were not uncommon from the eastern mints. I soon realised however that this meant that there was scope here for finding out something new. In order to become familiar with what is "normal" I started acquiring as many examples of as many eastern types as I could get hold of. This meant that I started getting too many of the common ones and then I started to get more choosy and only looking for variations I didn't have OR were die linked to other coins in my collection. I migrated to Alexandria and the later Laodicea issues along the way but soon found the early IMP issues were also open to research.
I now mainly focus on COS II reverse legend varieties, the COS II odd endings i.e. II C, II CO etc., the odd shortened COS II issues, IMP II and early IMP VIII issues.

 

Good questions! And its nice to read how the people of this board think about them.

For me:

1: the role of other people is virtually non existent. Not many people know I collect ancient coins, and the ones that do show little interest. Most find it either stupid that i spend money on it or are 100% certain they are alle fake as "nothing that old and tiny and 2000 years old can be real". Except for one friend:
2: I have a friend who had 4 ancient coins, I bought them from him, as he has shifted his interest into a completely different field. He is a collecter, and so am I, so we meet eachother in the fact that we both collect stuff other people find stupid.
3: And that leaves me with 0 coin collecting friends...!

The question is do I need to share my interest with other people. It's a yes and no. I collect because I love Roman imperial and imperatorial coins; the stories behind them, the men connected to them, the way they offer a small window into our distant past and relatives. It is an interest that is personal, and mine, and I do not expect other people to necessarily share that personal interest. But when I find a nice coin I wanted for a long time, win something in an auction for a great price, or find out about a little part of history which is just awesome, I do want to share that. So I am very happy and lucky, to find out about this board and live in an era where sharing knowledge and interests with people thousands of kilometers away, is as easy as pressing a button.