Ancient Roman Coins
Numismatic Auctions
Current, continuously updated, auctions of common, scarce and rare Ancient Roman coins. (Previous links to books about Ancient Roman coins at Amazon.com; also see, Ancient Rome at Wikipedia.) Mintmark.com is officially affiliated with Amazon.com and eBay.
"The first Roman coinage was in bronze, the natural metallic currency of Italy. The cities of Sicily and Magna Graecia had been among the earliest of all Greek mints to issue bronze coins in the fifth century B.C., and the original silver coinage of both the Sicilians and the Etruscans was based on a bronze weight standard, the litra, which was equivalent to a small silver coin worth about one-fifth of an Attic drachma. However, Roman civilization was far behind that of Sicily or Etruria and the Romans do not seem to have felt any need for coined money until the third century B.C. The formal conveyancing contract of mancipatio, which dates from before the Law of the Twelve Tables (450 B.C.), calls for bronze money and a pair of scales, but the law required the buyer under the contract to strike the scales with the bronze, a procedure which suggests an uncoined lump of some size. The first Roman money to have any sort of identifying mark, the so-called aes signatum, which was probably minted soon after 300 B.C., would have served this purpose well. The representation of an ox on the earliest of these cast ignots was apposite, as the word pecunia, money, was derived from pecus, cattle . . ." — Coins, by John Porteous
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