Originally Posted by
Chr0m0ly
Found this with in some change that’d been handed back to me one day. Minted during the second year of the Civil War, and in circulation for over 150 years.
Huh! That's pretty bizarre. There's no way a coin in such good condition has been in circulation 150 years, they wear out faster than that. It must have spent many years in a piggy bank or something.
Originally Posted by
OldsCOOL
It’s a Marcus Aurelius denarius that would help to frame a timeline. There are so many variations of these that it is dizzying to get an ID closer than that.
Ah, yes, thanks!
Marcus Aurelius would have been my second guess (after Antoninus Pius). Problem being that both are normally shown with a beard. So I'll guess this is from the time before he became emperor (161), in which case 150 was maybe not a bad guess. Good enough for me!
These things have been studied to death. I'm sure some scholar somewhere has already assigned this coin to a specific mint and a narrow timeframe, pretty much like any Fuji, Trek, Schwinn, whatever.
If you want to know more about the guy, his "Meditations" is worth reading. Not a page turner by any means, but full of wisdom.