Sir Thomas Browne digging up a Roman coin in his yard in 1667

[Marius]

I think many of you will enjoy reading this account, written in 1667, by Sir Thomas Browne.  He talks about Roman coins that he had found (a Diva Faustina denarius) and then (at the botom of the page) he tells how a friend Sir Robert Paston, while digging in his yard, had found a silver coin of Volusian, with pietas and altar on the reverse.  Many of Browne's statements are inaccurate (no Gibbon, Cohen or Mattingly as of yet) but his obvious joy at finding these coins, and his description of them is wonderful.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/brampton.html

There's a picture of the exact type of coin that Sir Robert Paston found in Alex's on-line gallery:

https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=125&pos=17

1667 seems so long ago, but the Roman coins must have seemed as old to them as they do to us, and finding them would be the same.

Richard

[slokind]

I failed to notice the coin, and I hadn't read it for years.  It is one of the things you find by reading Virginia Woolf, from whom I got less feminism but far more English Lit. than current devotees seem to get.  I forget where I picked it up, but in 'Night and Day', not her best novel, the title is mangled and I had to wonder whether she knew it very closely, after all.  Pat L.

[*Alex]

Since the link to the coin in question might become unusable if I add or subtract coins from my gallery I have pictured the coin below.

Alex.