Ancient Coins

Here let us remark in passing that ancient coins are by no means so rare as common opinion rates them. Many of them are very common. Thus the copper coins of Diocletian are far more plenty than American coppers of 1799 or 1804; and the small coins of Constantius are as abundant as any American or English coppers of forty years ago. The preservation of ancient coins is easily accounted for. In the absence of banks of deposit, or any means of investment, the poorer classes of people as well as the rich were accustomed to bury their treasures. The poor man's safe was under the ground-floor of his hut, so that wherever there was a village, there, under every house, were buried coins of gold, silver and copper. An invasion would sweep away a nation and annihilate the towns and villages. The buried treasure remained undisturbed until the modern plowshare, going over the site, turns up little heaps here and there which have lain for one or two thousand years. The peasantry of the Eastern countries make the discoveries of old treasure. In Egypt, for example, the fellaheen, working on the Nile banks, are accustomed to sprinkle over their soil the dust of ancient mud villages, which they find to be a productive manure. In digging among the ruins of these villages they frequently find collections of old coins. We once saw an Egyptian peasant woman who had about half a peck of Roman coins, nearly all of the same issue, and in as fine condition as American coppers of last year. Some were proof coins. We have over thirty of these in our own collection, purchased from this peasant woman at the rate of a khamsa (less than half a cent) for four of them. Not only nations, but many cities and provinces retained the right of coinage. It appears manifest that the value of the principal coins in all the Eastern nations was about the same. The gold stater of the Greeks was equivalent in value to the principal gold coin of other nations. The barter of different nations with each other was not much affected therefore by the variety of coins. -- Coins and Coinage; an article by W. C. Prime; Harper's New Monthly Magazine (December, 1859)

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. . . On March 15 [44 B.C.], Caesar was stabbed to death by a band of noblemen determined to stop him from assuming the powers of a king. The central drama in a thousand years of ancient Roman history, it has inspired literature from Shakespeare to the recent HBO television series Rome. The assassination of Caesar is a story told in coinage, too. The senators who conspired to kill him were especially infuriated at his shocking new practice of placing his image on the silver denarius -- for in the history of the republic, no living man had been portrayed on a Roman coin. And the assassin Brutus commemorated his own part in the murder by issuing a coin depicting two daggers and the legend EID MAR, for Ides of March. Today, it is perhaps the most sought-after of all Roman coins . . . -- Coin Capsule: 44 B.C., by Jon Blackwell (COINage [September 2007])

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