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QUESTION: Marty, is it true that Thomas Jefferson had a big Roman and Greek assortment of cash? Additionally, will you will have any historic cash for items this season?
HS
ANSWER: Sure, Jefferson had an intensive assortment of historic cash. In April 1805, Jefferson obtained from Nicolai Henrick Weinwich of Copenhagen “a field containing 150. items of Roman coin in bronze of various sizes from the reign of Augustus to that of Theodosius.” Two weeks later he forwarded them to the American Philosophical Society, the place they is likely to be “of extra intensive use. I consider he too like to look at hoards. For Jefferson, these cash weren’t simply curiosities; they had been historic paperwork. He studied them to grasp the chronology, iconography, and historical past of the traditional world he so admired as I’ve finished. Historical past is revealed from the coinage. Jefferson even wrote about utilizing cash as a instructing software for historical past.
Jefferson owned a big assortment of historic Greek and Roman cash. His catalog of the gathering nonetheless exists. Then there was what turned often called the “Jefferson Coin” that was a well-known Roman denarius of the emperor Antoninus Pius. It was found in archaeological excavations at Monticello.
One other little know reality is that in 1801, after his election as President, Jefferson bought his intensive library of 6,487 books to the Library of Congress to switch the books burned by the British in 1814. Whereas the coin assortment was not a part of this sale, his actions reveal his view of collections as a public useful resource for information.
John Adams additionally collected historic Roman cash, however not as extensively as Jefferson. James Madison and Benjamin Franklin are additionally recognized to have collected some historic Roman cash. By far, Jefferson had the biggest assortment.
Sure I’ll put a number of historic cash collectively. I had hoped to get a small group of the Rubicon denarii of Julius Caesar. The place they used to go for $600, now they’re round $1200. So, I didn’t get that group.
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