Episode Transcript
Glenn Shelton (00:00.184)
Please join us now in extending a warm virtual welcome to another member of the Numismatic world. Today, Mike Markowitz checks in with Boar Sizzle. Let's take a few moments to enjoy a visit with Mike, as he kindly goes under,
Glenn Shelton (00:17.874)
And there he is. Welcome Mike. How you doing? Hi Glenn. Thanks for inviting me. No, no, no. I appreciate it very much. I'm really interested for the people to learn about you. I'll tell you what. Let's go ahead and take a look at all of your accomplishments here. Make that some of your accomplishments here. So you've got
It's like you've got a little interest in history. You've been very active in providing articles for Coin Week. Just a real big history of doing that. Currently, you're the vice president of the Fairfax Coin Club, which is how you and I got linked. But you're also
involved in some other organizations and focusing on ancient history. And I'll go ahead and let people know that Mike, his specialty is ancient coins. You also have a little bit of a technical background. So you worked with that. Have you worked with the NASA folks, Mike? No, I've worked mainly with the Navy for the past 26 years. Very good. Very good. That's great. That's great.
And just as a side note, it's hard to ignore the our last item there. You are an award winning designer of tabletop historical war games. Very interesting. Very, very interesting. OK, no, no, no, that's that's great. All right. Let's tell you what. Let's let's sort of play a little game of This is Your Life and
talk about, well, first of all, where were you born? I won't ask you when, but where were you born? New York City. In New York, okay. I up on the North Shore of Long Island, a town called Great Neck. Okay, great, great. And great at Great Neck. And now you went for a BA in history in your undergrad. What, do you remember when you first became really interested in history? I owe it all to an inspirational Latin teacher in high school.
Glenn Shelton (02:35.05)
What we find in classical numismatics, study of ancient coins, is that people who studied Latin in high school are most likely to collect ancient coins. And I had for five years in high school a really inspirational teacher, Ms. Lillianfeld. And she left us with an interest in the ancient world. That's it. That took a little Latin self in high school and in his freshman year at, I went to undergrad in North Carolina.
So I have to say that that language died once and it may have died with me. I don't know. If I met a Roman on the street right now, he would have the advantage. There's no doubt about that. Okay. Now, combined with that though, is I think this is all a very interesting aspect of the thing that we share and the common bond
This show for people involved in the numismatic world is a simple fascination, interest, and love for coins. Do you recall when you first got interested and what might have sparked that interest? I think there's a collector gene. You're either born with it or you aren't. interested. And I got my start as a stamp collector because my father worked for the post office for most of his career.
and could get all the new stamps as they came out. Okay, wow. But now, how did you make the transition or the addition, rather? How did you add coins today? In college, I took a course called the Byzantine Imperial City. It was a course about Constantinople, which today is Istanbul, Turkey. It was the capital of the successor to the Roman Empire for over a thousand years. Wow. And...
Back around 1996, I discovered that you could actually buy Byzantine coins. back in those days, they were really undervalued before the Russian oligarchs discovered that they could buy them up. So I started collecting Byzantine coins. And Charles Morgan, the editor of Coinweek .com,
Glenn Shelton (04:59.47)
believed in me as a writer and beginning around 2012, I started doing articles for coinweek .com. And now many years later, I've got over 200 published articles. how did you first meet her? I had a coin show. Okay. And I think that's what happens is you either join a club
You go to a show, you get to talking to people. really is. That's where you can have your Hollywood moment being found sitting in the drugstore, right? Yeah, I'm always a little bit embarrassed when I'm introduced as an ancient coin expert because I've met so many professional numismatists who have forgotten more about ancient coins than I will ever know. No, no, no, no. Yeah, I I I'll let you say that, but.
I will not believe that. But, well, okay, I tell you what, we sort of danced around it a little bit here. Why don't we go ahead and maybe delve into that subject just a little bit. Maybe, all right, so just to put it bluntly, can you us a brief introduction to ancient coins and what makes them so fascinating to collect and study? Well, ancient coins are history that you can hold in your hand. Every year,
two of us from the Washington Ancient Numismatic Society go out to a private school in the horse country out there in Northern Virginia and talk to the Latin classes at this private school. And we bring some ancient Roman coins that these Latin students can actually hold in their hand. And when you see the excitement, the thrill that that is. They can put it in their hands and they can see it. It becomes something real. Right, this was an object that an ancient Roman
actually used that an ancient Roman made. Every ancient coin was a handmade artifact, right? Everyone was in some sense unique, not like modern coins, which are machine made and are all stamped out and come out identical. They had to hand make these. Yeah, I was just going to make my follow up question to you and we're sort of getting into it. was going to say if you could sort of elaborate on that basic idea.
Glenn Shelton (07:20.686)
and let us know your thoughts on what the ancient coins can tell us about the history, the culture of these civilizations that produce them. Back in May, I spent 12 days tour of Greece and we had one free evening that the Numismatic Museum in Athens was open late. So we took a taxi from the hotel over to the one of the great coin museums of the world.
It's in a beautiful marble mansion that was built by Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist who discovered the site of Troy. And there's a coin in that museum. It's one of four known. Harvard has one. There's one in the British Museum and there's one at Oxford. And there's this one in Athens. It's the gold stater of Athens. It's the coin that was made from the gold that was stripped from the statue of Athena in the Parthenon. Golden ivory statue.
Right, one of the great works of art in the history of the world. But in 406 BC, Athens was losing the Peloponnesian War against, they had a cash crunch, and the gold on that statue was their emergency treasury reserve. Wow, wow. So they melted it down and struck it up into coins, and I got to see that coin and take a picture of it. Wow. That's one of the great numismatic thrills of my life. Okay, now, as it would be for
Anyone that might be slightly interested, not only slightly interested in coins, but anybody be interested in history would appreciate something like that. Definitely. No, no, that must have been great. tell you another story. Please do, please do. Everybody has heard of Julius Caesar and knows that he was assassinated and that he was stabbed by Brutus, his friend. 2 Brute. At 2 Brute.
Well, Brutus fought a civil war against Mark Antony and Octavian and to pay his army, Brutus struck coins campaigning in northern Greece during this civil war. In 42 BC, Brutus issued a coin, the Ides of March Denarius. It's a little silver coin. It's a bit smaller than a nickel. And on the obverse side, the head side, there's a portrait of Brutus.
Glenn Shelton (09:42.772)
On the reverse, there are two daggers on either side of something that looks like a jelly bean. It's actually called a pileus, a freedom cap. It's the special felt cap that was given to freed slaves. And under that little scene of the cap and the two daggers are the letters EIDAR, which abbreviates a Latin expression, Eidebus Marteis, on the Ides of March. On March
with our daggers, we regained our freedom. The message is ascending to his army because Caesar, right, they believed was trying to make himself a king and the word king, Rex in Latin, was a dirty word in Latin. Right? So it's interesting because in that
The word Caesar took on various forms in societies that followed the word czar, the word Kaiser, every everything kind of developed from Caesar. And there goes my Latin knowledge again. But but you're right. That was it. I don't think he was taking no for an answer. That's the coin. Fantastic. Thank you for showing that. The Aids of Marchenarius.
There's about 80 examples of it known in silver, three in gold. So it's one of the great rarities of Roman coins. At a coin show about two years ago, Aaron Burke let me hold one. And that was a thrill. Again, it's just like you said a moment ago that it happened thousands of years ago. Now you're experiencing it again. It's
It's, it's, it's, you know, that, and that's just it. If, if the coins aren't destroyed, they have longevity and they will survive over the ages if you can just hang on to them. So, so let me, let me ask a follow up on those thoughts and ask you a couple of things. One, given these experiences that are a couple of these experiences that you shared.
Glenn Shelton (11:58.456)
when we ask, if someone asks you, I am right now, out of all the ancient coins that you have encountered, do you have a personal favorite, something that's, I don't like to get into best kind of thing, but I would like to know if you do have that sort of stands out or that you kind of put at the top. I'm gonna open that up for you, I'm gonna say, even if you have not actually seen
If there's something you just know about and that's your favorite because you just developed the love for it. There's about 300 coins in my current collection. And if I had to pick a favorite, it's a coin that I was after for 20 years before I able to acquire. You found your movie there? Exactly. It is the Sol Reign Gold Solidus of Emperor Theophilus, Byzantine Emperor.
ruled at Constantinople from 829 to 842 AD. And for the first year of his reign, he ruled alone. Then after about a year, he crowned his son, the future emperor Michael II, and put his son on the reverse of his coin. But during his sole reign, he only put a double -barred cross on the reverse of his coin with a inscription in Greek around
that's unique. Kyrie Boithai Tosodulo, Lord help thy servant. It's a unique coin. It's very rare because it was only issued for a year. And I finally spotted one, right, in a case at the Long Beach Coin Show. And I got a good deal on it from my friend Dave Michaels, right. And I'd have to say of all the coins in my collection, it's my favorite.
Would you like to see what it looks like? you've got it handy, I think we all would. I'm not sure if I pointed it out when we first started talking, but I think everybody's starting to appreciate that it's impossible to tap into all of your knowledge in one session. And so just wanted to let folks know that if Mike's amenable, we'll be having some future sessions and we will continue
Glenn Shelton (14:20.942)
chisel away, take off little pieces of Mike each with each visit and just enjoy what he has to say. Okay, now if we follow up on that and tap back into something we discussed a little bit ago about your 200 plus published articles, I want to, just like we did with the coins here,
I like to go in that direction with the articles and the publications. You've written, again, over 200 articles that have been published on the Amizmatics. And that's just the published articles. That's not all the writing that you've done. You've done many, many areas, even in addition to that. Would you say, again, this is where we're running up a little bit on our time, but if you could take just a moment and let us know
what you thought were maybe one or two of the more influential ones. And also in any research that you were doing, did you come across things in writing the articles that definitely added to our general knowledge of ancient coins? I have one article that's my favorite. Okay. And there's also a podcast up on about it on the Coin Week website. What made Alexander so great?
My first published game was about the Alexandria. I've always been fascinated by the career of Alexandria the Great. So I'd have to say that's a favorite. I think probably the two best things I ever wrote were an article called Why Museums Hate Ancient Coins. That's simply because coins are small. They are, if they're precious metal, they're a security headache. They're hard to curate. unless you have two of them, you can only show one side.
at a time. The other article is why Hollywood gets ancient coins wrong. And it's always struck me that the depiction of ancient coins in movies and TV shows about the ancient world is radically incorrect. And again, it's because coins are small, right? And they don't show up well on screen. A great example also is the movie Troy, right? Brad Pitt, right, as Achilles.
Glenn Shelton (16:40.59)
And there's several scenes where they're cremating a dead hero and they put coins on his eyes. Well, that wasn't custom in the ancient world. OK, OK. You put the coin in the mouth to pay the boatman. But that didn't catch on until coins became in common use. And that's after 600 B .C.
The Trojan War is back before 1000 BC. Coins haven't been invented yet. So what are they doing in the movie? I think it's the same reason there was a Starbucks cop in Game of Thrones that episode. Anyway, things just happen. But I see your point. Definitely, that would be
I could see where we've got some authenticity lacking there. Before you go, I would like for you to do one thing. When we talked a little bit about, when we were talking about the history, meant to ask you that whenever we were talking about that, but I am familiar with a certain aspect of altcoins and I'm sure many of the folks that are viewing and listening are also familiar, but there may be some folks that are not. If you could in just a minute or so, let us know about
ancient coins still being found. My knowledge is that before the soldiers would do battle, they would bury their coins, go do battle and come back and pick them up, do something with their money while they were fighting and they used to bury them. And if they didn't do very well in battle, then the coins stayed buried until they were there. And that's how they're still being found. Could you enlighten or elaborate on that a little bit? Right. There are basically three sources.
of ancient coins that come to the market. One is hordes, H -O -A -R -D. That's buried treasure, not H -O -R -D -E, which is a Mongol army. The great majority of ancient coins are found buried in clay pots. There were no banks in the ancient world, so if you wanted to keep your money safe, you put it in a clay pot and buried it far away from your house or any inhabited area. Right now, if the barbarians came through or you died in the next plague,
Glenn Shelton (18:57.356)
Right? It's still there in that clay pot. The problem is that most source countries have confiscationist laws that say anything ancient found in the ground belongs to the state. The result of that is that much of the trade in discovered hordes, right, is a sort of underground trade. There's only one country in the world that has sensible antiquities laws, and that's the United
called the portable antiquity scheme. The law there is that everything ancient, right, that's metal, that's found in the ground has to be reported, but the finder and the landowner are entitled to split the fair market value. As a result, we know much more about the circulation of Roman coins in Britain than we do about the circulation of Roman coins anywhere else in the empire because everything gets reported and there's
middle detecting hobby in the UK that's very active, that has a good code of ethics, and it's a law -abiding educated population. Now a lot of coins that come to market come from old collections. Coin collecting really got its start during the Italian Renaissance. The great Italian poet Petrarch Francesco, he mentions in one of his letters that he used to buy Roman coins that were found
by the vine workers working in the vineyards that would come to him and sell him the coins they found. I've heard there's farmers in the Balkans that make as much from their metal detectors as they do from their crops, just because they turn up hoards in their fields. Wow, that's very interesting. Very interesting. Okay. Well, listen, Mike, I just, can't thank you enough for taking a few minutes today.
And as I've mentioned to folks, know, that we're looking forward to some future visits with Mike and we will tap into his knowledge. There's probably a few years of history we haven't covered yet. that true, Mike? Yeah, there's two things I'd like to leave you with. please do, please do. There's an old saying among numismatists, buy the book before you buy the coin. But that only works if you read the book. And the other thing I like to say is that if you're not having fun with your coins,
Glenn Shelton (21:20.639)
you're doing it wrong. That's very interesting. That's very, very, I mean, well, listen, thanks again, Mike. We really, really appreciate you stopping by today and we're looking forward to, forward to your future visits. Okay. You take care. Okay. Bye bye. Bye
