idesofmarch01

29 minutes ago, shanxi said:

11 Caesars, coin 4 and 5 are the same 😁

Yeh, CNG screwed that up in their group picture.  If you click down to the individual pictures, here's their Claudius denarius:

Yesterday I was perusing CNG's Coin Shop for new items and noticed a rather unusual offering -- a high quality lot of 12 Caesars denarii:

The listed price is $97,500 and there is more detail on their website.

This piqued my curiosity about whether I could put together an equal or better collection using only coins available publicly, at auction or purchase, within the last two years and equal to or less than CNG's list price.  Here's what I came up with:

My collection would have cost $93,200 including an average 20% buyer's fee for those 11 coins that were sold in auctions and arguably each coin is as good or better than CNG's lot (no insult to CNG intended!).

So, here's the challenge: can anyone here put together their own virtual 12 Caesars denarii collection, within the above criteria, at or better than my $93,200?

I'm also interested in hearing everyone's general thoughts and opinions on CNG's and my set.

Finally, here's the approximate cost for each of the coins I chose:

Julius Caesar -- $8,400

Augustus Caesar -- $8,500

Tiberius -- $3,600

Caligula -- $12,000

Claudius -- $10,500

Nero -- $6,600

Galba -- $8,600

Otho -- $9,600

Vitellius -- $10,300

Vespasian -- $4,600

Titus -- $6,000

Domitian -- $4,500

I love all the denarii illustrated here especially inasmuch as I currently don't have any in my collection and their diversity is extensive.

Coins of Hadrian were the direction my collecting veered after my 12 Caesars were relatively complete.  

My first Hadrian was the she-wolf aureus (included below) but as I researched and viewed upcoming auctions, my focus quickly went to his travel series.  A number of features drew me to this focus: not just the artistry, but especially the reverses with their personifications of various entities such as a continent (Africa), rivers (Nilus), and countries (Egypt, Hispania).  I don't know that I'll ever have a complete collection even across the different metals, but the series is infinitely intriguing and illustrates the reasons I find ancient Roman mythology continually engrossing.

From time to time I spend time online researching provenances, but it can be a slow process especially since there's no really systematic approach to doing so.  As of now, the only really old provenance of which I'm aware is that my anepigraphic-reverse Nilus (upper right corner) is ex Judge E.E. Farman (early 1900s).

I'd also be curious about how the delineation between the arches and the roof(?) on the reverse suddenly became so much better:

Ultimately the coin needs to be inspected in-hand by an expert but personally I see no reasonable interpretation under which this coin wasn't "worked."

At first when I saw your coin, based on its gold color, I thought it was this aureus:

That would have been quite an achievement for your first auction win!  I'm assuming your denarius probably appears a little more silver in hand!

My personal experience in finding provenances is that once you've researched the online resources of previous auctions (e.g., ACSEARCH), your next step will be accessing online archives of old catalogs that have black & white plates, with pictures of those plates.  This can be very time-consuming so be prepared for the amount of effort it will require.

My only coin with Diana has the "action figure" reverse with her drawing an arrow from a quiver:

AUGUSTUS
AV Aureus (7.90 g.)  Lugdunum circa 11 - 10 B.C.  RIC 196
AVGVSTVS - DIVI-f Laureate head right.  Rev. IMP - XII Diana, wearing polos and long drapery, advancing r., holding bow and taking arrow from quiver.  In exergue, SICIL
From the Biaggi collection, ex Gilhofer & Ranschburg and Hess 22 May 1935

6 minutes ago, Sulla80 said:

- Buyer's fees

- Shipping fees

- Currency exchange rates

- Sometimes the most shocking: international customs/export license fees

Of these four fees, the last three apply equally to dealers and auctioneers, and can be reasonably well-calculated or estimated by contacting the dealer or auction house.

It seems fairly straightforward to calculate these additional costs whether buying from a dealer or bidding in an auction.  

13 hours ago, GregH said:

However i think it is a false economy to compare the profit margins of auction houses vs dealers based purely on mark-ups. Correct me if i'm wrong: my understanding is that the dealer buys his inventory. Whereas the auction house pays nothing for their inventory; they receive it from the consignor (and take a fee when it sells). The dealer wears a lot more risk, so i can understand some of the astonishing mark-ups that we see. Granted, the auction house still needs to pay for wages, marketing, the cost of running the auction, and all the admin mentioned previously, so they need to charge fees to someone. An auction house really is the perfect business if you have a large enough audience - you never have to purchase stock.

This is the key difference between a dealer who maintains inventory and an auction house -- the cost of carrying inventory.  Sometimes this is funded by loans, sometimes by the dealer's cash reserves, and mostly by a combination of both.  This reduces the dealer's per-coin profit hence justifying a larger markup on each coin.  But otherwise, both the dealer and auctioneer have similar categories of costs and expenses (except maybe the high-quality auction catalogs) and I would think that the main advantage for the auction house is the reduction in risk of carrying inventory for too long, which explains their lower markup.  It's also my understanding that for high-quality collections, auction houses will provide both an advance and guarantee to the seller, which increases their risk measurably.

Note, though, that some auction houses such as CNG also maintain and sell a retail inventory so there's likely a reasonable profit to be made in this aspect of the business too.

19 hours ago, GregH said:

- Buyer fees in auctions - which have zero utility for the buyer. What am i paying for exactly with this fee? I put this fee in the same category as booking fees for the theatre. It's just a bullshit fee to inflate the price. It also makes it hard for me to estimate my total price - i already have to guess what currency exchange rate i'll be paying (it's never the actual exchange rate) or what postage option the seller arbitrarily selects.

When I think about buyer's fees in auctions, I always compare them to possibly purchasing the same coin from a retail dealer.  The transparency of buying a coin in an auction almost always compares favorably to buying a similar coin from a dealer.  Here's more explanation.

Let's say you win a coin at a hammer price of $100.  With a 20% buyer's fee, you'll pay $120 for the coin (not including shipping and insurance, which is common to both types of transactions).  Assuming the seller paid a 10% seller's fee on this coin, the auction house has a 33% markup on this coin (a profit of $30 on their cost of $90).  On more expensive coins -- say, a hammer price of $10,000 -- the markup is even lower.  Most likely the seller of a $10K coin didn't pay any seller's fee so the auction house makes a markup of 20% -- the buyer's fee -- in this case.  This makes for a fairly transparent purchase.  Plus, my opinion is that a 20% - 33% markup would be more than reasonable if I were to buy a coin from a dealer's inventory. 

On the other hand, retail dealers are very unlikely to be selling a $120 coin for only a 33% markup.  More likely, it's a 50% - 100% markup, but there's almost no way of knowing what their actual markup is.  So the $120 auction hammer price may be a bargain for comparable coins that are held in dealers' inventories.  Personally, I have seen a number of high-priced coins hammer at auctions for, say, $50K ($60K including buyer's fee) only to be immediately listed on the dealer's website for $120K or more -- a markup of 100% or more.  Of course, with a little research you can discover this and negotiate with that dealer, but you're never going to get an auction coin for a price remotely close to how much you would have paid if you had won the coin at auction.

I agree that the psychological hurdle of a 20% buyer's fee can seem excessive if you regard the auction house as simply a pass-through of the coin from seller to buyer, but even in this case, I can make a fairly compelling argument (left as an exercise for the reader) that when you analyze the entire business model of an auction house, even 20% - 30% gross profit can be a very thin margin except for the half-dozen or so highest profile auctioneers (NAC, CNG, Heritage, et al.).

In my area we have an extraordinarily wide range of animals, and not infrequently I capture some of the more reclusive ones on my outdoor cameras.  The most amusing might be this one from a couple years ago -- a mother bobcat (lynx) and her three cubs:

Recently we also caught this lone explorer around our pool:

3 hours ago, Curtisimo said:

CNG and Nomos take great photos for detail but undersell toning significantly.

2 hours ago, DANTE said:

...but I agree with what @Curtisimo said about underselling toning.

Interestingly, I recently won a coin in CNG's latest Feature Auction mainly because I was offered an opportunity to view the coin in hand after inquiring about it directly with CNG.  Below are CNG's online photo and an enhanced version of that photo that looks a lot more like the coin in-hand but even then doesn't do justice to the coin's luster:

Plus the scratch below Hadrian's ear is much less obtrusive than it appears, and really only visible when the light is coming from a specific angle.

Personally, I wonder if the darker original image was meant to emphasize the coin's very slight toning at the expense of its luster.  

Which do you prefer?  

I find the (bottom) more natural-appearing version much more appealing and after viewing the coin in-hand, reset my budget accordingly higher.  Even then, I thought the hammer price was an incredible bargain.  

Still searching for an older provenance on this coin, though.

While it isn't my intention to justify or rationalize CNG's commission structure, I will point out another factor in this issue.

Even in their Electronic Auctions (in which the coins may be consigned and aren't necessarily from CNG's inventory), CNG guarantees authenticity.  If the coin is later determined to be a forgery, CNG is on the hook for refunding the hammer price plus buyer's fee, and while they have legal recourse against the consignor, collecting the hammer price from the consignor is anything other than certain.  Thus the apparently high commissions also cover CNG's own (internal) insurance premiums for those coins that might later be returned as forgeries.

51 minutes ago, Hrefn said:

@DCCR, I am curious to know if you photographed your coins in one big pile, or combined multiple photos into one image.  A most admirable collection.   My only Celtic coin is my avatar.  

It's a virtual tray -- a collage of separate images combined using software like Photoshop Elements.  It's fun but time-consuming to do.  

My own collage is in the Gallery area of this site -- just click the Gallery link at the top of the page:

14 hours ago, DCCR said:

Wow!  Quite the visual feast!  Two thumbs up!

#1 --  the public toilets at Ostia

#2 -- I believe is also Ostia, the public forum area

#3 -- the Pantheon

#4 -- appears to be one of the statues inside the Pantheon, but I'm not sure

#5 -- Hadrian's villa

#6 -- ?

#7 -- Can't remember which arch this is...

#8 -- something to do with Augustus?

#9 -- Colosseum

#10 -- lower level inside Colosseum

#11 -- part of the Forum near the Colosseum, not exactly sure which ruin this is

#12 -- Marcus Aurelius bronze (reproduction of original in Capitoline museum?)

2 hours ago, John060167 said:

Not to mention you have an aureus? Congrats…have a picture of that?

Part of my 12 Caesars collection is a "mint set" (my designation) of Claudius's coins.  For those who haven't seen these too many times already on the previous website:

9 hours ago, John060167 said:

About the coin itself, it is not perfect but it is still in pretty nice shape overall! Well struck and centered, decent grade, good weight and solid silver (a lot of Claudius denarii from this era tend to be fourrees as they were made in high numbers in Britain during Claudius’ invasion, so keep that in mind. They tend to be too underweight compared to genuine silver examples, often under 3g, sometimes a bit over. You can also see base metal exposure often too. ) The main issue with this coin is it has some pitting and a flan flaw on the obv but besides that it is pretty nice!

Claudius is one of my favorite emperors despite his somewhat checkered reputation (partially due to that ancient gossip Suetonius).

I agree your coin is in pretty nice shape overall and I wouldn't be too concerned about the pitting as long as the coin isn't exhibiting porosity.  In addition, the obverse is my personally preferred Claudius portrait, regardless of the fact that occasionally other portraits are considered slightly more artistic; my aureus and denarius both have this style of obverse portrait. 

I had posted this coin and the story behind its acquisition on a previous ancient coin website, but the coin is worth a re-posting here especially since I just changed my avatar to be the obverse!

I bought this coin solely for its artistry -- abstract modern art that was created 2000 years ago.  Still awe-inspiring and breathtaking!

Whenever I click a topic in the TOPICS list -- e.g., "Post your latest Ancient" -- the replies are ordered from the oldest to the newest.  I'd prefer to order them from the newest to the oldest but I can't find a setting for this anywhere on this site.  While the TOPICS list itself has a "SORT BY" option, the actual postings in that topic always are sorted oldest-to-newest.  This will get very cumbersome as topics grow to hundreds of postings.

Can someone help me out here?