Holed coins - who wanted those?

On Thu, 2 Nov 2006 20:47:48 -0500, "Model Citizen"
wrote:

Reid, Did you pay $5.00 for the AE1 of Julian II you have?

Several other interesting things about late Roman bronze coins ...
just thinking about this the other day. I mentioned before how they're
the best bargains in all of numismatics. That's because of supply and
demand. On the supply side, billions of these bronzes were struck,
with silver and gold coins being rarely used during this period, and
many thousands are unearthed in hoards each year. On the demand side,
there aren't enough collectors to soak up all this supply.

Some collectors regard these as junk ancients. Michael Marotta used
this term in fact in one of his Third Side of the Coin pieces. They're
not, of course. They represent an interesting time period, the fourth
and fifth centuries AD, when the might of ancient Rome was fading,
weakened by barbarous incursions from without and rot from within. It
was also a time when Christianity as a religion became officially
accepted and with its emphasis on faith and authority and its
suppression of original thinking, reason, discovery, and
experimentation led the West into a dark age lasting a thousand years.

These coins, though they suffer aesthetically with their largely
generic obverse portraits, have a wide variety of reverses that
typically sought to emphasize the might of Rome and reassure its
citizenry that happy times were here again. Yet the Western Roman
Empire would soon be kaput, with the Eastern Roman Empire, the
Byzantines (or Romaions), merely keeping alive the knowledge created
largely in Greece. It wouldn't be until the rediscovery in the West of
these classical teachings that original thinking and discovery
blossomed again, during the Renaissance.

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