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RESTITVTORRoman coins, AD 192–337
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About

The hundred and forty-five years when everything could have tipped.

We deal only in Roman coinage struck between the death of Commodus in 192 and that of Constantine in 337. It is turning points that hold us, and this one is dizzying: an empire on the verge of coming apart, then set back on its feet. Had Aurelian failed before Palmyra, the West would have separated for good. Had Severus Alexander reigned long, the army might never have formed the habit of making and unmaking emperors. Had Gallienus been able to give the senate back the role he meant it to have, Rome would have remained something other than an autocracy.

None of that happened, and the coins carry the record: the denarius gives way to the antoninianus, silver vanishes from the flans, mints multiply from London to Antioch, Christianity appears in the legends and the imperial portrait becomes that of a master. Every reform leaves a recognisable series. It is a history you can hold in your hand.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888The Historia Augusta claims that Elagabalus had his guests buried under a rain of petals until some of them suffocated. The text is late and probably malicious, but it was enough: seventeen centuries later, Alma-Tadema had roses shipped weekly from the Riviera for four months in order to paint them from life.

What holds us

An ancient coin is not an ornament. Someone engraved it, someone spent it, and it reached a hand of today intact. A Gordian III once passed through ours whose portrait is so alive you would take him for a teenager seen this morning: eighteen centuries, and nothing has moved. That link is what we sell.

A price that can be explained

We do not try to be the cheapest. We try to make sure you know what you are paying for: the rarity of the type, the state of preservation, the crispness of the strike, the provenance. Every record gives the elements behind the price, and you can always write to us about it.

Everyone starts somewhere

No prior knowledge is required to buy a first coin. The records explain what to look at and why, the three-dimensional view lets you turn the coin before you own it, and the articles are written to be read by a beginner.

Saying what we know

A certain attribution and a hypothesis are not written the same way. When a provenance is unknown to us, we say so. It is the only way to be believed about everything else.

The Restitutor team