408, Lot: 436. Estimate $750. Sold for $1000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

The Caesarians. Julius Caesar. February-March 44 BC. AR Denarius (17mm, 3.64 g, 4h). Lifetime issue. Rome mint; P. Sepullius Macer, moneyer. Laureate head right / Venus Victrix standing left, holding Victory in extended right hand and vertical scepter with left set on star. Crawford 480/11; Alföldi Type VI; CRI 107b; Sydenham 1072; RSC 40; Type as RBW 1684. VF, toned, a couple of old scratches beneath toning, flatly struck in areas.

From the Andrew McCabe Collection, purchased from Numisantique, 2010.

All of the portrait coins of Julius Caesar from RRC series 480 were likely produced prior to his assassination on 15 March 44 BC. The fabric, style, and minting techniques of the coins indicate a number of parallel workshops and not a single sequence as laid out by Alföldi and Crawford. That these coins all pre-date 44 BC is also the view of Bernhard Woytek (see Arma et Nummi, 2004) and Professor T.V. Buttrey, who in a 2015 paper suggests the entire issue was intended as financing for Julius Caesar’s proposed Parthian campaign. The anomolous type RRC 480/20, with an obverse of Caesar and a reverse of Antony’s desultor issue, and known in very few examples from one obverse die, can most easily be explained as an unintended mule. [Andrew McCabe]