Thanks for the kind words and warm welcome everyone. I really appreciate it. You're right; if I don't like cleaning, I just shouldn't clean. For some reason I
had this preconceived notion that you can't be a true ancient coin collector without cleaning, but I suppose that is foolish. I like the idea of
buying already cleaned coins and attributing them. Now
that, to me, sounds like a lot of
good, potentially less expensive, fun.
Hi Zach. Welcome to the Forum and welcome to ancient coin collecting.
I'm curious how you discovered the hobby. Was it through your classics course work or some other way? I studied ancient history and classics at college, but at that time numismatics was not part of the curriculum. I understand that is changing now.
I have a professor who specializes in
numismatics. In fact, he taught a course, which I could not take because I was studying in
Greece at the time, that was all about the
Roman economy. In it, students actually cleaned uncleaned coins he selected from a somewhat large lot. He chose the choicest ones, obviously, so that
his relatively unexperienced students could clean and attribute them.
I got into the hobby because, quite literally, I was sitting in my dorm room one day reading Mary Boatwright's
From Village to Empire when I started thinking about
ancient coins. My grandfather used to give me old modern coins since I was very little, and, thanks to him, I have quite an interesting modern coin
collection. So, given that early exposure and my love of
Roman history, I put two and two together and decided I would
search online "
buying ancient coins." That
search brought me here and it has been bliss ever since!
