History & Stories

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.

More than two millennia after his death, Alexander the Great remains the most influential figure in numismatic history. From his lifetime “Lionskin” tetradrachms to the deified portraits struck by his successors, his image transformed how the ancient world viewed power and kingship. Discover why the conqueror’s face stayed on currency for centuries and how his legendary status continues to drive the ancient coin market today.

An elephant. A serpent. A single word: CAESAR. In 49 BC, Julius Caesar used one small coin to attack his rival, announce his divine authority, and finance a civil war. It’s one of the most sophisticated pieces of propaganda in the ancient world — and you can fit it on your fingernail.

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.

The Roman Empire didn’t appear overnight. It emerged slowly, across four turbulent centuries — civil wars, assassinations, reforms that were supposed to be temporary, emperors who insisted they were merely “first among equals” while their coins told a different story. Ten coins from the collection trace the full arc, from Republican moneyers advertising their families to the desperate restoration antoniniani of the third-century crisis. The history books came later. The coins were written now.