Carausius and his brothers

People suggest that the arrangement of the three emperors on the CARAVSIVS ET FRATRES SVI coinage shows a deference to Diocletian in that he is central and flanked by his junior colleagues Maximianus and Carausius. This seems reasonable as Carausius may have been trying to build bridges with the legitimate emperors of the time.

The same may not be strictly true of the Romano-British coins that feature the rulers separatley in that there is a differentiation in the bust styles between Carauius and his two "brothers".


Carausius is usually portayed with a draped and cuirassed bust,


whilst Diocletian and Maximianus are usually cuirassed only, perhaps suggesting the seniority of Carausius, in the British isles at least.

It is by no means an exclusive division of the portraiture but it does appear to have been the normal way.

This looks as if it may be an extension of the convention from earlier times when caesars were bare headed whilst the emperor was depicted laureate. Similarly in the third century when the radiate crown became the usual way of portraying the male personalities on antoniniani the caesars were differentiated frequently by being represented by a draped bust whereas the emperor was draped and cuirassed.

You can't prove anything.....

Isn’t it always the case when a catalogue is published that new specimens are found straight away as people begin to use it. I’m in the process of updating a catalogue for a particular series of the coins of Carausius and whilst I am checking against significant public and private collections I know new ones will turn up after it is published.

It’s because we’re dealing with an unknown total population. We know what does exist and we may predict what should exist but we don’t know what could exist. We’re dealing with a sample population and therefore we cannot, for certain, prove a hypothesis, only disprove it. I can’t remember my lectures so well but it may be called deductive reasoning (or possibly inductive reasoning).

The example I was given at university, a number of years ago now, was that we could come up with a hypothesis “all swans are white”. We can test this by observation and indeed the hypothesis will hold true until the first black swan is observed.

An example in the coin world is could be the Gallic usurpers. In the 19th century the hypothesis “the Gallic usurpers that issued coins are Postumus, Laelianus, Marius, Victorinus, plus Tetricus I and II” was thought to be true. There was no indication that it was not and all the data from hoards and site finds corroborated it. In 1900 we finally knew with certainty that the hypothesis was not true because a coin of Domitianus II was found. So, we now include him in the hypothesis of the list of Gallic usurpers that issued coins which we will only know for certain not to be true when a new usurper is found. As we are dealing with an unknown total population the hypothesis itself can never be proved true.

Karl Becker, 1772 - 1820

Perhaps one of the most famous ancient coin forgers of the last couple of hundred years is Karl Becker who is known to have produced coin dies for well over 300 coin types. Whilst many were for the Roman series, in particular the gold aurei, he also produced dies for Greek and mediaeval European coins.

In his day, before the accurate reproduction of coins by photography, many of his coins succeded in deceiving collectors and curators of collections. However, in modern times with the accurate photographs of legitimate coins being able to be compared with Becker's actual dies, many of which are kept in the Berlin cabinet, he does not really confuse the experienced numismatist.

His career seems to have taken a number of paths, for example, by 1795 he was established as a wine merchant and from 1798 to 1802/3 he was in business in Mannheim as a draper.

There is a tale reproduced in Hill's biography of Becker that early in the 19th century he was sold a false gold coin of Commodus. When he discovered that it was false he tried to return the coin only to be told that it served him right for meddling in things he didn't understand. This may have been the catalyst for Becker to learn the art of die cutting so that he may take revenge on the fraudster which he eventually did.

Numismatic Reference Books

For the last 18 months I have been standing at coin fairs selling antiquarian, second hand and out of print numismatic books and what has struck me is the reluctance of people to actually buy many of these works.

I can understand that going to a fair you might be more drawn to a new coin purchase, history in the hand as it were, and for the price on some of the books the coin might, at first, appear better value but without the books you are buying blind.

What governs the price of numismatic references? I suppose new ones the amount of work that has gone into the publication, the research and knowledge it contains, the fact that many works aren’t big sellers so set up and print runs are more expensive per unit cost and so on.

Why should a second hand numismatic book cost so much? Again it must be judged on the knowledge/information it contains, is it available elsewhere or is the work the reference for the series, how many people want it and how many are available to meet that supply, given that above we have already acknowledged that some of the references are in extremely short print runs and there may not be an alternative reference for the series. That is always then assuming that it is not an antiquarian book.

The long and the short of it is that many of the most detailed and up to date resources are expensive, but also specialist, and many of the "normal", general, collectors are not willing to pay out significant amounts of money for them.

It depends ultimately how detailed, I suppose, that you want to document, record and understand the coins in your own collection as to how much you will pay for specific references.

Jigsaws; don't you just hate it when........

Just set about doing my 103 piece double sided jigsaw of the Charles II "petition crown" that has been published by the London coin dealers Spink & Son. I got to the end (well really just past the beginning) to find that one piece of the border was missing at the top!

Of the 14 "petition crowns" that are known to exist only three are in private hands, nine are in museums and two are unaccounted for.

The coin they have used is the specimen owned by Geoffrey Cope, the finest known example. He is the collector who has also lent an absolutely superb example of the EXERC BRITANNICVS coin of Hadrian to the British Museum.

There is also an absolutely superb sestertius of Agripina Senior in his collection.

Numismatic biography on Wikipedia

I have spent more than my fair share of travelling of late and indeed I am currently on a train as I type this meagre post. There are, I have discovered, a number of numismatic, or associated, biographies on Wikipedia. Some are merely stubs but others offer quite an insight into the lives of people, the only knowledge of which we normally have is through their published works:

Philip Grierson (largely sourced from interviews printed in Spink's Numismatic Circular)

Lord Grantley (very brief)

Lord Stewartby (very brief)

Joseph Pellerin

John Watts de Peyster Wrote an interesting monograph on Carausius and is, perhaps, more of a historian than numismatist

Joseph Hilarius Eckhel

Henri Cohen

William Henry Waddington

William Stukeley

William Hunter

Laurie Bamford A wonderfully colourful sketch of a collector of British coins, beer enthusiast and singer in a punk band. A worthy wiki biog and one that I would have been proud of.

Sir John Evans

Max von Bahrfeldt

Ya'kov Meshorer

Jean-Jacques Barthelemy

There are probably others and I hope that this encourages some of you to explore further.

Venuti

I have done a little digging to find out a little more about the work of Venuti, cited in Akerman's letter, posted yesterday.

Rudolfino Venuti (1705-63) was working in the mid 18th century, some 100 years prior to Akerman. Bassoli's book on the Antiquarian Books on Coins and Medals from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century (2001) states that:

"Rudolfino Venuti richly illustrated the medal collection of Cardinal Albini in 1744 (which later passed to the Vatican Library and was opened to the public by Clement XII). The work also included Benedict XIV's additions, and the great classical and modern collection of Cardinal Carpegna."

Sadly his work does not seem to have been scanned onto Google Print, although there seem to be plenty of references to it cited.