Roman Commemorative Questions

This coin was issued by Constantine to commemorate the founding of Constantinople, minted in Nicomedia. It's bronze and is real, it's a common coin and not very valuable. It has been overcleaned which has removed the patina and making the coin shiny.

It's been cleaned. Ancient bronze coins almost always look like rocks when they're first dug up out of the ground; they all need cleaning. Electrolysis is considered a very harsh cleaning technique; there are other ways to remove the encrusted dirt from an uncleaned coin, without ruining the detail of the underlying coin like electrolysis usually does. Perhaps the coin was heavily corroded to begin with and electrolysis was it's only hope, but now that it's happened we'll never know if it could have been cleaned better.


I don't see any indications that it's fake. These "anonymous city commemoratives" for Constantinople are a fairly common coin design, issued at over a dozen mints throughout the Empire. Mintmark SMN(delta), fourth officina of the Nicomedia mint, is listed as R1 (only slightly rare) in the Helvetica list. The The example on Wildwinds for RIC 196 is from the scarcer fifth officina, epsilon.


The alloy is usually reported as being "bronze"; it's exact composition probably varied with time and from mint to mint.


I personally don't like repatination of coins, either ancient or modern. This coin has been damaged by overcleaning; repatination simply adds to the damage, while attempting to hide the original damage.

In a way, yes. They're Greek numerals.

The system we in the West use for numbers - 1, 2, 5, 8, etc - wasn't invented until the middle ages. In ancient times they had different ways of writing numbers, usually using the letters of their alphabet. You're probably familiar with "Roman numerals" - I, II, V, VIII and so on. The Greek system was different. It assigned values between 1 and 1,000 for each letter of the alphabet. Because you need 27 symbols to cover that range and there are only 24 letters in the standard Greek alphabet, they had to use three "obsolete" letters for the three remaining numerals (6, 90 and 900) - letters which used to be used in parts of the Greek world long before coinage was invented, but had fallen out of use by 300 BC.

The full table of Greek letter-number conversion can be seen here, but basically you're correct - A=1, B=2, (gamma)=3, (delta)=4 and E=5.

The one in my sig, and posted below has a similar appearance. It was also my first Ancient Roman coin purchase! I like it, even though it has been overcleaned and basically has very little value. It didn't cost much and it's a nice chunky coin...I will sometimes just throw it in my pocket when I'm going to be hanging out with friends who haven't seen a Roman coin. It's always a good conversation piece.