Hello,
I recently picked up a
denarius of
Diadumenian at
auction. I received it yesterday and began to have some concerns. First off, it was very light in hand. Light to the point it felt "wrong". The listing specified that the
weight and
diameter were 2.53g and 20mm respectively so maybe that should have been cause for concern but its kind of hard for me to mentally translate those number into an in-hand feel.
I then took a closer look at the coin under magnification and the encrustations near the
rim at 6:00 on the
obverse looked a
bit odd to me. At this point I decided to dab a small quantity of lemon juice on the encrustation using a
fine point Q-tip to see what was revealed. What I saw was spots of reddish brown metal surrounded by silver. I'm almost positive that this is copper.
The first image I've attached shows a cropped version of the picture provided by the
auction house. The bottom two images were taken by me after I
had exposed the underlying copper.
So is this indeed a
fouree or could something else explain what I'm seeing?
Thanks,
JSlade