Numism > Reading For the Advanced Ancient Coin Collector

Beautiful Julia Domna

(1/6) > >>

Rupert:
Okay, I'm mostly into rarity hunting, but every now and then beauty strikes me. Today it happened again when I could not resist buying this Domna, RIC 630, attr. to Emesa. I'm looking forward to getting it in the next days. Isn't she lovely? There are quite a few very nice Julia Domna portrait denarii around at reasonable prices, I can post some of my "conquests" later in this thread.

Rupert

curtislclay:
VENER VICT is one of the commoner types, but ALL Eastern denarii of Domna in old style are rare, so you've got a scarce coin as well as a nice one!
Julia's sestertii too, of course, are all rare.

Rupert:
An impressive sestertius, really! Is that mattress she's wearing all her own hair ????

An interesting thing about the Julia Domna coins is the great variety of the portrait itself, not only the hairdo. You often wouldn't think that two coins show the same lady. It isn't hard to understand in my first picture because the coins are from two different mints (Alexandria, RIC 612, and Emesa or Laodicea, RIC 614), but on the second picture you see two coins both of Rome and from the same period! The right one is, of course, much rarer, but the engraver of the left portrait sure had a better day than the colleague who worked on the rare VESTA MATER coin!

Rupert

curtislclay:
Interesting, but I have to object that the two Rome-mint pieces are NOT from the same period.
The HILARITAS denarius was struck in 196, the VESTA MATER coin in 207!
This according to my own researches.  Hill 310 has the HILARITAS type wrongly in 198, Hill 888 has VESTA MATER correctly in 207.

Rupert:
All right Curtis, I only have RIC which puts them all in one big group "196-211", and of course you're lightyears ahead of me in this field. I can live with that :).

Rupert

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page