Caracalla. Big Fan Of His Coinage, But I Am Questioning This One I Bought. Most Are Good!

Ok, amazing insight. I did a slight drop and it sounded different but don't have much else. It looked too good in hand and I had to question it

@new, if you are concerned about whether or not this coin is silver, why not do a specific gravity test?

Some reading for you...

https://goccf.com/t/39666
https://goccf.com/t/129463

@vic, you know way more about these than I do so I'm definitely not questioning your assessment that the coin is fine. With that said, the OP mentioned doing a ping test. Is that not done to assess the alloy? My point was that there are less potentially-damaging ways to assess the alloy than the ping test.

I would concur with the general sentiment that "don't do the ping test on ancient coins". For two main reasons:

One, these coins are not nice and perfectly round like a modern coin. The "sound" a metallic object makes when it resonates depends to a high degree on it's shape, as well as it's composition; "shape" doesn't normally need to be taken into account for modern coins, because they're all the same shape: round, and all nice and even with no cracks and protrusions. So two otherwise identical (and both perfectly genuine) coins of Caracalla might sound completely different from each other, simply because of their uniquely different shapes.

Two, there is an interesting physical property of silver that you desperately need to be told about: silver "crystallizes" as it ages. This crystallization not only will alter the sound a coin makes when it "pings", but will more importantly make the coin much more brittle. Sudden stress placed upon the coin (such as by hitting it or dropping it on a hard surface) might have merely made the coin "bounce" and "ring" 2000 years ago back when it was freshly struck, but today that same force could simply make a crystallized coin "shatter" instead. Ancient silver coins are much more fragile than their modern-day counterparts. I'm not the only collector to have had an ancient silver coin snap in half in my fingers, simply from the slight pressure of squeezing it into a coin flip. We really don't want to be applying stress to these coins unnecessarily.