Why I Collect Ancient Roman Coins
In the picture above I’m holding within my hand a silver denarius minted in Ancient Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius between 161 and 180 AD. Emperor Marcus Aurelius was considered one of the better Roman emperors, the last of a string of decent leaders known as the “adoptive emperors” beginning with Nerva and ending with Aurelius’s choice of his biological son Commodus to succeed him. At that point it was all down hill for the empire.
I have begun a modest collection of ancient Roman coins, focusing on pre-Diocletian post-Republic silver coins known as denarii. As seen in the picture above they are quite small, roughly the size of a dime, and usually weigh around 3 grams. As with any hobby the key one can spend too much money. This site specializes in the high end where one can spend thousands on a single coin. Some of these are works of art (for truly beautiful ancient coins check out these Greeks). I stick to a $50 per coin limit.
There’s something sublime about holding a coin that was minted by hands long dead. I find the honest wear of these coins more appealing than the sterile beauty of their high end cousins. This wear is the result of being touched and carried by countless people, and each coin sets one’s imagination alight. Was this a day’s wage for a Roman on a Parthian campaign? Or was it an offering to the numerous gods the Romans worshiped? Then there are the hands of those who kept it over the millennia, first as a store of wealth after the collapse of the empire, then as a curiosity and finally, a reminder of a time long before. I sometimes reflect on Life and see the threads of generations that tie us to our distant past. The strands are clear for the most recent generations, but it doesn’t take long for them to trail into darkness after only a handful of generations. Yet what amazes me is although the strands are in the darkness and we don’t know to whom they tie us, we still feel their pull on us in our daily lives.
The foundation of the calendar that manages our time lay in the reforms made by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The names and duration of all the months are courtesy of Caesar (except Quintilis and Sextilis which were named July and August after Caesar and his successor Augustus). Our political system, our philosophy, even the languages we speak are all tied to the Romans and their idolized yet disrespected forebears, the ancient Greeks. Everything we do is shaped by the threads which stretch into the darkness and lead back to Rome and the hands that touched that coin, yet these threads remain invisible to us.
But the coins aren’t just about the past, and the threads don’t end with us. They pass through us and it has nothing to do with whether you have children or not.
We are participants in History and we shape its future in ways that are impossible for us to imagine. Dramatic gestures like voting mean much less than the low-level interactions we have with one another. One of the most important decisions I made in my life, to appeal my rejection from college, was suggested by a co-worker at a video store I worked at. I forget her name, but her words led me to challenge the decision successfully which in turn placed me at a location where I met my Wife. I didn’t know that moment was so important, and neither did she, but her kindness and my humility to accept her advice came at a critical moment. The importance of that interactionhas tempered my interactions with others and made me more positive and helpful with those I meet because I never know if and when I will have a similar impact on them the way that bouncy little college girl at the video store in 1988 had on me.
Just as the hands shaped the Marcus Aurelius denarius, our hands will shape the world of those far into the future who will touch the things we touch, and feel the same tug of threads in the darkness that we feel. We of course will be long dead but our influence will live on just as the Romans does today. Let us hope they will think of kindly and not judge us too harshly, or worst of all, forget us.
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