In 235 AD, Roman soldiers murdered their emperor in his tent and replaced him with a peasant general. In the fifty years that followed, the empire would cycle through more than twenty emperors, watch its currency collapse, break into three rival states, lose its first emperor to foreign captivity, and endure a plague that killed millions. And then — against every reasonable expectation — it put itself back together. The Crisis of the Third Century, told through nine coins from the collection.

Hold a small dark bronze coin in your palm. On one side, a Roman cavalryman charges with his spear lowered. Beneath his horse’s hooves, an enemy collapses in desperate defense. Above them, three Latin words: FEL TEMP REPARATIO — “The Restoration of Happy Times.” This is the Fallen Horseman, struck in the tens of millions across every mint of the empire in the mid-fourth century — and it may be the most ironic propaganda coin in Roman history.

In AD 476, the Western Roman Empire collapsed. The Eastern Empire — ruled from Constantinople, Christian, increasingly Greek but still calling itself Roman — continued for another thousand years. Modern historians call it Byzantine. Its coins constitute the longest continuous numismatic tradition in human history, and almost nobody knows anything about them. Four coins from the collection trace 740 years of that story, from the consular bronzes of Tiberius II to the medieval silver of the Palaiologos dynasty.