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Author Topic: Gracchus Denarius?  (Read 3724 times)

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Offline Suda

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Gracchus Denarius?
« on: June 18, 2015, 01:22:23 pm »
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!

Offline PeterD

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #1 on: June 18, 2015, 01:59:39 pm »
The GR may refer to Sempronius Gracchus. However, Crawford says "There are no good grounds for identifying the moneyer as a Sempronius Gracchus". Whoever he was, he was the moneyer (a relatively junior official) who had the coin minted. If he was indeed a Gracchus he would have been an ancestor of the famous Gracchii. Family name was very important in the Republic and would have been zealously guarded over the centuries.
Peter, London

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Offline Andrew McCabe

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #2 on: June 18, 2015, 02:06:56 pm »
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.

Offline gordian_guy

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #3 on: June 18, 2015, 08:45:24 pm »


Andrew, List,

It was easy enough to find Andrew's example on his sites and lo and behold the photo used at the top is Andrew's photo. Interesting!!

c.rhodes

Offline Suda

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #4 on: June 18, 2015, 09:29:47 pm »
Oh! I looked up Gracchus coin and found the best photo I could find. Camera's being a bit wonkey so I couldn't get a very good picture. My example strongly resembles yours, except it's a bit lower quality.

Offline Andrew McCabe

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #5 on: June 18, 2015, 11:21:02 pm »
Ok understood, no problem.

Given that it is a very rare coin type, we would love to see your actual coin once your camera is fixed, especially as the style of these coins varies a lot.

Offline Suda

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #6 on: June 18, 2015, 11:50:01 pm »
Rare? Wow, I got this for a great deal then. Bought the denarius and a victoriatus together for only $50.

Offline Norbert

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #7 on: June 19, 2015, 01:08:12 am »
@Sudo

I guess you have made many of us very curious.
Any photo would be great even right now if it is sub standard or taken with a telephone camera.
You can still replace with a better image later on..


Yours very interested

Norbert

Offline Andrew McCabe

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #8 on: June 19, 2015, 05:48:20 am »
There's six of the type on acsearch. Compare to 20 good silver EID MAR and 971 L.Piso Frugi denarii (and thousands more L.Piso Frugi sold elsewhere). For a main Republican denarius type, 6 on acsearch which amounts to a single example every two years or so, counts as really rare. Unfortunately it wont translate into valuable because these rare dioscuri types are often so difficult to get that there isn't a large enough collector field to provoke high prices when one does crop up. But it's a great find. I'm only surprised that a specialist in the area didn't snap it up, since evidently you bought it without any idea of what the coin was.

Offline Suda

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #9 on: June 19, 2015, 11:47:21 am »
evidently you bought it without any idea of what the coin was.
Pretty much. I was looking for a dioscuri denarius dated to within 50 years of 211 BC when I came across these coins, and I snatched them up when I saw the price. It took me a while to identify the denarius because I kept thinking the "GR" was actually a "CR."

Offline Norbert

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #10 on: June 19, 2015, 01:18:48 pm »
because I kept thinking the "GR" was actually a "CR."

You would certainly not be alone with this.
Mommsen describes the type as having specimen of both "GR" and "CR".
Or to be more specific he referes to 3 coins, two of which are "GR" and one being "CR".

And as you are intesting in the identificatin of the Gracchi: He also states that "Gracchus" was the only roman name starting with "Gr" known to appear in the 6th century (ab urbe condita - after the founding of Rome) .

Best regards
Norbert

Offline Suda

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #11 on: June 19, 2015, 01:54:06 pm »
I supposed that makes sense. I've read that G and C were interchangeable in Latin. Upon closer inspection of my coin, mine definitely possesses a G.

Offline Suda

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #12 on: June 24, 2015, 04:03:00 pm »
@Sudo

I guess you have made many of us very curious.
Any photo would be great even right now if it is sub standard or taken with a telephone camera.
You can still replace with a better image later on..


Yours very interested

Norbert
The wait is over! Finally got my camera fixed. What do you guys think?

Offline Norbert

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #13 on: June 24, 2015, 04:58:31 pm »
First of all thank you for posting the picture. And please excuse me and everyone else for the irritation caused by choosing the first one.

And now congratulations for the catch. You have managed to get yourself a quite rare and interesting coin here.

For me, looking at your picture and at the one from Andrews coin above, I have to realize once again hwo much I have to learn and to practice.
You can call me blind - I am not able to decide with certainty if or not this is from the same die pair.

Also just spending some more time on it and checking RRC I find Crawford lists 20 obverse and 25 reverse dies. The Kestner Museum Hannover lists 4 coins in its catalogue, the Bode Museum in Berlin again shows none. This is what I have checked as it is easily accessible for me.

From this I would expect to find this coin type on sale once in a while - but obviously it is not.  And even if it is not that well preserved it is certainly worth having.

Best regards and enjoy your good luck :)
Norbert





Offline Suda

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #14 on: June 25, 2015, 10:09:28 am »
Awesome. I have two questions. How many examples of this coin exist? And is this coin rare enough/good enough for an NGC slab?

Offline 77HK77

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #15 on: June 25, 2015, 10:54:05 am »
Many here will tell you no ancient is "good" enough for a slab.

 keep it out of prison

BTW NGC does not guaranty authenticity of ancients

NGC Ancients is committed to grading only genuine coins, but it does not guarantee authenticity, genuineness or attribution, nor is any guarantee of these aspects implied. NGC Ancients will only holder coins it considers genuine at the time of submission, but it cannot guarantee the authenticity, genuineness, type, attribution or date of any coin it holders.

If your looking for some type of COA look elsewhere, if your looking to protect the coin, it has survived 2000yrs without a slab

Offline benito

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #16 on: June 25, 2015, 11:02:33 am »
I do not know the exact number. 44 + 1 or more for sure.

Offline Andrew McCabe

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #17 on: June 25, 2015, 12:08:37 pm »
Crawford's "20 obverse and 25 reverse" is a statistical estimate based on extrapolating from the 17 coins he was aware of (the 17 would have contained a certain mix of matches and non-matches that allows an estimate to be made). There are coins 10 listed in Banti, and 6 on acsearch. These numbers probably overlap to an extent, i.e. it's possible that the same coin appears in each source. Therefore so as far as I can count, total known specimens may amount to somewhere around 30. This compares to around 100 EID MAR types. I don't know where the "44+1" of benito comes from.

It's not a good idea to NGC slab it
1. as I noted above, there's no especial value to this rarity. Collectors don't tend to pay much for even very rare worn dioscuri types
2. it's really not in good enough condition to merit slabbing
3. there's no question about the coin's authenticity that would be helped by slabbing it
4. there's no especial reason to slab any coin, even if in good condition. Collectors just break open the slab, as they'll want to hold it

Offline Suda

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #18 on: June 25, 2015, 12:14:47 pm »
30... Wow. And you're right, I'll just stick it in an airtight for the time being. My coin shop guy is fairly pro-slab, and I think it's rubbing off on me.

Offline Victor C

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #19 on: June 25, 2015, 12:55:35 pm »
My coin shop guy is fairly pro-slab

Let me guess...he mainly deals in modern coins.
Victor Clark

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Offline Suda

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Re: Gracchus Denarius?
« Reply #20 on: June 25, 2015, 02:16:27 pm »
You guessed right.

 

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