What's The Best Way To Become Educated On Ancient Greek And Roman Coins?

You can start here in the sticky section labelled Books, downloads, and websites, there you will find information of all type of ancient coinage. I wrote a book a few years a on general guide to ancient coins. Here is a link to it.
https://www.coincommunity.com/ancie...%20Guide.pdf You might find it useful.

bearded Pan = escaped lunatic

Not sure that you are too far off from how he was portrayed in Greek mythology.

I went to the local public library and read all I could about ancient Greek and Roman cultures history, with a preference for books that a young teenager would be happy to read.

I then went to my local coin shop and asked for advice on what would be the best introductory books to read that are specific to ancient coins. I went to my State Library and took out a few of those to read.

I then bought second hand books by authors such as David Sear:
Greek coins and their Values, and
Roman Coins and their Values, and
some very good books on ancient coin forgery, in order to educate myself on how to pick fake coins. With education from a professional specialist ancient coin dealer, with whom I had developed a friendship, I bought a range of fake ancient coins, also with the intention of educating myself on how to identify fake ancient coins.

All of this process took about 5 years, and along the way, I started buying a few ancient coins.
I have to admit, my first ancient Greek coin was my avatar coin, but that came from one of the World's most respected coin ancient dealers at the time:
Spinks London, waaay back in 1978.

My first Roman coin was a silver denarius of Antoninus Pius, also a long time ago, in 1966. My first purchase of ancient coin book (by David Sear), was also purchased in that year.

I also feel very privileged to have the ready support and advice of perhaps Australia's leading authority on ancient coins, who has access to one of the biggest specialist coin libraries in the World.

Over here in Moscow, Panticapaeum AEs are filling the bargain bins, but they're in way worse quality, and almost nobody is buying them - and we certainly don't put them in slabs!

I'm not actually a fan of Pantikapaion (as I would have spelled it) coinage, but mostly only because there's so many subtypes of those coins with all kinds of designs, and it's so easy to get confused.
...Well, that, and they tend to be in horrible condition (I suspect metal detecting finds from recently occupied Crimea).

I'm not a fan of slabbed coins, but when first starting out (especially on expensive coins) it's the way to go. My advice, read past threads on this forum and others. Educate yourself, it may take awhile, but you will become comfortable in your purchases. Also, you may want to pick a specific era or civilization in order to become more knowledgeable on what to look for.




Funny that's what attracted me to this one:



C. VIBIUS C.F. CN. PANSA CAETRONIANUS. Denarius (48 BC). Rome.
Obv: PANSA.
Mask of Pan right.
Rev: C VIBIVS C F CN IOVIS AXVR.
Jupiter seated left on throne, holding patera and sceptre.

There has been a glut of coins of Panticapaeum and other Crimean types in the market these last few years. Curious that.

On a lighter note, many classic references on ancient coins, the British Museum Catalogues for example, are freely available online as pdf or ebook downloads at sites like books.google.com, archive.org and hathitrust.org.