Recently I purchased an early denarius and I finally got around to identifying it. Wildwinds and Crawford both identify this particular denarius as a "Gracchus Denarius." What exactly does that mean? The Gracchi Brothers weren't born until after this coin stopped being minted, and I'm pretty sure there wasn't a city or town called "Gracchus." Thanks for the help!
"Gracchus" is a
cognomen, which is a modifier to a family name, in this case the family "Sempronius". Because it's
part of a family name, there were hundreds of thousands of people named Gracchus over many centuries. Only two of these multitude of people of the Gracchus family were the famous Gracchi brothers. These were two brothers,
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, well known populists who tried to pass contentious, left wing laws relating to land redistribution that annoyed the elite in
Rome. This provoked unrest leading to and their assassinations in 133 BC and 123 BC respectively.
Evidently there was some other member of the same family who issued the coin you illustrate early in the second century BC, and put
his name (GR)acchus on the coin. This earlier Gracchus isn't known to us historically. The coin
type is very
rare.
But what I'm very puzzled about is that the photo you link to is of MY coin of this
type, and that exact coin is currently sitting in my
collection. I haven't sold it. The photograph was taken by me. I even know what tray the coin is sitting in, but I can't access it right now as I don't keep my coins at
home, but I did visually check the coins were where they were supposed to be very recently. So I've no idea what coin you bought. You can't have bought this exact coin. At least I
hope not! If you actually are holding this coin in your hand, then please let me know. That would worry me a lot.