Love for Ancients
Our First Article!
It’s rare to hold in the palm of one’s hands something that’s 2,000-plus years old and dates back to the Roman Empire. But that’s one of the major perks to owning a collection of ancient coins that have buried in the ground for thousands of years on the other side of the world.
“It’s not a tremendous amount of coins,” said Dean Kinzer, a Mt. Vernon resident, about his collection. “But the ones that I have are pretty significant.”
Kinzer’s collection of 36 silver coins focuses primarily on the Roman Empire, from 49 to 42 BC — which is known as the time of the Roman civil war. He participates in auctions and purchases coins featuring the likeness of such legendary historical faces as Julius Caesar, Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, and Decimus Albinus. All four men were key figures in Caesar’s assassination in 42 BC, which launched a string of civil wars that decimated the Republic and initiated the start of the Roman Empire.
Each coin, Kinzer said, “are works of art.”
His interest in coins surfaced three years ago. His father was a huge coin collector — mostly of American coins, which surprisingly are much more popular to collectors and far more expensive to purchase than coins of antiquity. When his father passed away, Kinzer began selling off the vast collection. While doing so, he came across a Tribute penny — one of the coins shown to Jesus when he made his famed “Render unto Caesar” speech. The coin made him pause.
“I just really took a liking to it,” Kinzer said.
So he began researching online and purchasing books concerning coins, even listening to historical audio books to and from work. Before long, he was sweating it out in front of his computer, bidding with other collectors worldwide in auctions, slowly piecing together his coinage collection.
“It’s just mind-blowing to me that you can own something that’s older than our country,” he said with a shake of his head, who serves as director of operations for Midcon Cables in Joplin.
What’s fascinating about the Roman coins, he says, is what’s found hammered onto each side. Early coins, he said, mostly had the likeness of various gods stamped on them — Zeus was a common one, for example.
“Rome had a long-standing tradition that they wouldn’t copy the Greeks or put the face of a living human being on their coins,” Kinzer said. “To understand Republic Rome is much like the U.S. — the thought of having a king on an (American) coin was so vomitus that they wouldn’t stand for it.” Romans were much the same way — “their coins reflected gods, not mortals.”
But Julius Caesar changed all that. Much like Greece’s Alexander the Great before him, the Roman general and statesman — named “dictator for life” by the Roman Senate — began placing his face on the coins that were distributed to Roman soldiers as payment.
“Putting his face on a coin meant that, to a lot of Romans, he was considering himself a king or a god,” Kinzer said, “and a lot of people believed his minting of coins with his face on it helped him get assassinated, a key moment in history.
“At this point in history there’s obviously the Chinese empire, the Persian empire, and then you have the Roman empire,” he continued. “Those are the big three, and if Rome had stayed a republic, the world would probably be far different than it is now. The fact that I can hold that history in my hands — knowing that each of these coins were issued to a living solder of Julius Caesar or Brutus or Cassius — is just mind-blowing to me.”