408, Lot: 364. Estimate $1000. Sold for $950. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

Anonymous. Circa 260-250 BC. Æ Litra (or Double Unit?) (27mm, 14.97 g, 4h). Mint in Sicily. [ROMANO], head of Roma left, wearing crested Corinthian helmet [decorated with griffin]; cornucopia behind / ROMA-N[O], eagle standing left on thunderbolt, head right, wings open; short sword to left. Crawford 23/1; Sydenham 30; Kestner –; BMCRR Romano-Campanian 5; Burnett-McCabe, Obv.5/Rev.5, O5/R5:4 (this coin). Near VF, thick dark green patina. Very rare.

From the Andrew McCabe Collection. Ex RBW Collection duplicate, purchased from Numismatica Ars Classica, 14 September 1996, at $2,000.

The recent Burnett-McCabe study (“An early Roman struck bronze with a helmeted goddess and an eagle,” in Essays Cutroni Tusa, 2017), conclusively demonstrates that this coinage was struck at the very end of the first Punic war, rather than at the beginning of the war. One known reverse die has the letter E under the eagle's legs in a manner that confirms the prototype for the reverse to be the Ptolemaic octobol, Svoronos 446, first struck after 245 BC (Lorber). The obverse portrait is likely to portray Roma rather than Minerva. The study confirms the coin's Sicilian origin, with ten specimens now traceable to Sicilian finds or museums. Data is from both east and west Sicily, including most recently a site find at Mount Iato. Given that Punic war activities in the late 240s BC were in both east and west Sicily, there is now no special reason to assign the coins to Messana.

[I would like to append here a correction to the Burnett-McCabe study: two pieces categorized in our study as tooled, namely O3/R4:2 (13.49 grams) and O3/R4:3 (10.74 grams), are in fact modern die struck pieces. The modern dies have been seen and match these two pieces exactly. Anomalies we considered a result of tooling are in fact stylistic errors in the manufacture of the modern dies. We have no reason to doubt any other coins from obverse 3 and/or reverse 4.] A. McCabe