The period from the rise of Alexander III of Macedon to the Era of the Diadochi hasn’t just fascinated me. I am literally obsessed over it. What started as the goal for a single coin from the lifetime of Alexander the Great has morphed into a huge project in which I attempt to tell the story, covering roughly 150 years, through coins.
My interest in this time
Ancient coins offer an amazing plethora of stories to enjoy, but in my mind this is the king of them all. Sure, there was plenty of intrigue during the Roman Republic and several years when multiple emperors took the Roman throne. But perhaps only the fall of the Republic had nearly the impact on world history as the travails of Alexander III.
The Persian empire, among the most powerful in the world, was conquered. Egypt became hellenized and would remain so for a thousand years. Asia Minor too became strongly hellenized and would remain that way until the fall of Constantinople. Even in far away India, history was affected in a way only matched in recent times.
Choosing the coins
Just determining which coins these are has taken a great deal of time. It’s involved poring through dozens of auctions in a search for new parties I’ve overlooked. The list has ballooned from under ten, to “no more than 18” to my current situation, where I’ve given up on the prospects of “collecting them all” or even having an all-encompassing list.
While many of the individual coins are interesting, I find most exciting the interplay between them. Each of these people did not operate in a vacuum. They allied with, fought wars against, married, or were related to multiple others. I’ve long said that I don’t collect coins: I collect stories, and this is the grandest story of them all. So vicious were the wars amongst the various actors after the death of Alexander the Great, that if one could choose between being a major player in this era, or in Game of Thrones, the story from the series of novels would offer the better survival rate.
My collection has grown considerably as I’ve branched out. It started with a few Romans and principal characters from the time of Alexander the Great, mostly the Diadochi. At that time, I wasn’t sure which why I’d head. I still add Roman coins from time to time, but I’m now mostly focused on Greek.
After focusing only on people, I then branched out into cities. Again, I focused on the period from 350 BCE to 250 BCE, but again when I reached a point that it became challenging to add more targets, I branched out. I now add an occasional Sicilian, Greek Italy, or coin from the 2nd or 1st century BCE. I don’t think I’ll ever have every city, but it will be fun to see how many I can acquire. I’ve also begun to collect multiple types from some cities, since I find the bronze coinage fascinating and their relatively cheap to obtain.