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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;maridvnvm, post: 3983408, member: 31620&quot;]Doug,</p><p>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&#039;t find too much information about. I have always had a nose for the &quot;different&quot; and wanted to learn more.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here are the two coins in question:-</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><img src="https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10618/RI%20077m%20img~0.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p>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. </p><p><img src="https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10618/RI_064an_img.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p>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.</p><p>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 &quot;normal&quot; 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&#039;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.</p><p>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.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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