Well, PIOS Ox, anyway. Yes, I love the coin.
Thank you all.
I got it in 2003, and the seller, Teresa Darling, did grade it "XF to AU", and she is neither an unwitting
nor a rapacious person; I always have liked both her coins and her pricing, but I do not remember what I paid for it (did not record
price, and 2003 receipts were on the old, old computer, and I don't know how to decipher her code), but certainly not the
price of gold: perhaps about $200, because it was bought on a whim, well informed but not a 'necessary' purchase. Well informed:
1. I was and
still am curious about the engraving
tools used increasingly in the first half of the 3rd century; parts of the
Tyche look as if they were done with a hot V chisel in butter!
2. It is a coin that shows both the color of the metal, bare but not by stripping, and a sound
patina—a
patina that actually has luster, not wax, on the
reverse field.
3. It is a
Tyche with the large infant on her
arm that shows that it is not confined, in
Moesia Inf., to
Diadumenian. Yet
Pick himself did not see it,
nor anyone else, even Gospodin Jekov, who notices much that others have missed, until the MacDia studies alerted us to it.
4. I wondered about the pattern of patination: I suspect that it came from a sealed enclosure in which some
new coins were tightly stacked. Only if I knew the date of its discovery (which could be years and years before I got it) could I go looking for others of the same date, end of
Caracalla, that were less emphatically 'piebald' and so ended up in hard-copy catalogues. Of course, this coin might be the only one that by chance looks this way.
But my taste for Quintilian issues took time to develop. I think that all of us at first tend to like a dandified Septimius and an adorable brat. These coins took even an old art historian time to divorce them from the specter of living with the persons in the
portraits.
Pat L.
attached: some of the tool traces that are interesting