My Top 25 Coins (Maybe)

That is an interesting coin!
Love it!

#15 was probably made at a mint in southern France according to what I have read. Sextus died in 35 BC but he was most active in the region of Sicily and north and west from there since not long after Caesar died. He has several types of denarius and I am not at all well schooled on them. The Janiform as certainly shows his father as well. Can you post a photo?

with Oxos, this is one of the nicer fourrees I've seen.
It's a very nice looking coin, and once again Doug's writing keeps me coming back.

#14 Ptolemy II AR tetradrachm Tyre mint Year 34/33 - 252 BC

While the Ptoemies ruled Egypt after the Empire of Alexander the Great was divided among his generals, there was considerable jockeying for position among the Hellenistic states resulting in coins struck in places outside Egypt. In this case the club under ligate TYP beside the reverse eagle identifies this as a coin of Tyre. Not mentioning various other magistrate marks we will go one to the feature of this beat up old coin that made me want it. To the right of the eagle is the regnal year date for the coin. It starts with a lambda which is the Greek numeral for 30. Following that is a delta 4 cut over a gamma 3. The coin is quite worn and it is not terribly certain that the gamma was first with the delta on top but wear can play tricks with the eye and I prefer to consider this die an overdate rather than an error correction. It is the only Greek overdate I have ever seen and, to the best of my knowledge, I am the only person alive who cares. There is no market for Greek overdates. Next to no one collects these coins by date series. My goal, before I die, is to find someone who can convince me that I am wrong about being the only one who cares.




I am, however, very much of the opinion that I was not the only person who ever cared about this coin. In the late 1980's I greatly enjoyed being a member of a group of ancient coin collectors in Washington DC - The Ancient Numismatic Society of Washington. One of the members (and a particular friend of mine) died and his widow asked another member to assist in the disposal of his collection. After cataloging the bunch, his best offer from a dealer for the whole lot was about 25% of what he thought it was worth. He obtained permission to try to get a better return for the family and donated a lot of work toward that end. Part of the plan was to bring the lower end material to club meetings and let members have a shot at them at what he considered a fair retail price. I bought several coins over a period of several meetings and to this day regret a few specific coins I remember after all these years. One buy was this beat up old tetradrachm for which I paid $45. I did not know more about the coin then beyond that it was Ptolemy II and a tetradrachm.

The deceased member was a metallurgist by profession and a technical collector by avocation. He had many fourrees, brockages, magnetic, oddly shaped or just plain weird coins. This coin was not marked as an overdate but I will never be convinced that he did not know and agree with my opinion of the coin's special nature. In fact many of the other coins he had probably had some story behind them that none of us (certainly not the member who did the cataloging) were prepared to understand. I do feel that had my friend lived another few years, I would have become a several times better educated collector than I am today.

Oooops, sorry dougsmit => timing is everything, eh? (I posted my "previous-coin" question at the same time as you posted your "new coin") ... my bad!!

I believe a fourree coin to be worth about 1/4 of what the same appearance in solid coins would bring BUT lets remember that most fourrees are a lot uglier than solid coins so a pealing coin with ugly core showing would be worth 1/4 of a damaged solid coin not a nicely worn one. That means that a coin grading VF and solid worth $100 would start at $25 and go down from there according to how much core showed and how ugly it makes the coin. Most fourrees I have strike me as worth 10% of the solid price. That means also that an ugly, peeling fourree of a common denarius worth $50 in VF could soon get down to $5. Most dealers try to get many times as much today compared to what they asked a few decades ago when 'honest' dealers had to be coerced into selling fourrees at any price. There is an old story of a London dealer who had a junk drawer of unsellable coins that included several Brutus EID MAR fourrees. His attitude was that he could not sully his reputation by selling such trash but would buy them as part of a collection and take the loss. I would fear selling that Sextus Pompey because I could see too high a number of dealers who would resell it without mentioning its status.

Don't pay $150 for a fourree unless you would pay $600-$1500 for the solid version and you see the style as a reasonable approximation of the real thing. Trash is trash; if you buy it at all pay trash prices.

Oops, there is one exception: A fourree tetradrachm of Alexandria that is EXACTLY the correct style that was in use when the documented issue of official plated coins is worth more that the equivalent solid coin. 99.9% of plated owl tetradrachms are NOT from the Emergency but from the workshops of crooks. Below is my nicest owl fourree. It is NOT in my top 25. By style it is at least 20 years too old to be from the Emergency period so it was made by a private crook not the official government crooks and, as such, is not worth 25% of a solid coin like it and not worthy of my top 25 list.