When I read about the men who presided over the end of the Roman Republic, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Octavian, Cassius, Brutus, the same question echoes: who was good and who was bad? I want to choose sides with Brutus. He was on the side of liberty - was he not? His coins say so in so many words - protecting Rome from the tyranny of Caesar. And then there are the events in Lycia, which question the practice of sorting historical figures into good and bad. Marc Antony's Oration

Ancient coins from auctions always have a dealer's attribution, sometimes tucked into the flip in tidy abbreviations. It can sometimes be dressed up to be very authoritative-looking - and very often, is unreliable. Auction houses vary in their expertise, and even the best of them cannot be specialists in every series; everyone, eventually, makes a mis-call. The ticket is a starting point, as today's coin will illustrate. Here's what the dealer described Greek Mysia, Pergamon,

The Latin term dextrarum iunctio literally translates to "the joining of right hands" and serves as a symbol of fidelity, loyalty, reconciliation or unity of factions. Being a Roman emperor in the half-century after 235 did not promise a long and profitable career. The empire ran through some twenty-six emperors, nearly all of whom died by violence, most at the hands of their own soldiers. In 260, Valerian was taken alive by the Persian king Shapur, the only Roman emperor ev

An arched structure of access to the cavea of the Aigai theater. A canting type is a coin design that makes a pun on the name of the issuing authority, almost always a city, by depicting an object, animal, or plant whose Greek name sounds like (or is identical to) the city's name. The term "canting" is a modern name borrowed from heraldry, where "canting arms" (armes parlantes) do the same thing for a family name. Ancient visual puns: the city's name, spoken in pictures. You