From Miller Ancients founder and CEO, Spencer Miller
Like many passionate coin collectors, I have been involved with the hobby my whole life. Born and raised in New York City, from the age of five I would regularly visit the Sunday afternoon flea market to talk to Bobby, an eccentric 77-year old with a table consisting of such treasures as early U.S. large cents and Barber dimes. He recalled to me how he had once owned a 1793 Large Cent, which made him a superhero in my book. The coins I collected served as a prism to an American history I was fascinated by – the silver nickels minted during WWII, William Jennings Bryan's crusade for a silver-based economy in the 1890s as it related to the Morgan Dollar, etc. Even at that time, however, I was probably more captivated by the histories of the Greeks and Romans, and delighted in studying eight years of Latin. But like many U.S. coin collectors, I was unaware that their coins – being two thousand years old – were accessible to the general public, much less affordable.
All that changed when I came across some ancient coins online (in remarkable condition) that were available for surprisingly accessible prices. After that, it was easy to quickly transition my collecting focus to ancients. After all, $5 gold half eagles dropping from 91.67% gold to 90.00% in 1834 as a result of Andrew Jackson's bank war is exciting, but what about Commodus' coin portraits adopting the guise of Hercules near the end of his reign, as he fell into mental insanity? Or Alexander the Great wearing the elephant-skin headdress symbolic of his conquest of India? The historical allure and beauty of ancient coins was too difficult to resist, even for my high school self. I was committed to learn as much as I could.
I initially focused on the period that most interested me historically: the Late Roman / Early Byzantine period. I studied late Roman coinage with Kerry Wetterstrom and Doug Mudd, two of the foremost experts in the field, for two weeks in Colorado Springs at the 2018 ANA Summer Seminar. The course, in addition to introducing me to long-term friends, gave me my first expertise in authenticating, identifying, and differentiating certain types and determining where to find value.
At the onset of the pandemic, I had started a small-scale ancient coin dealing operation, but in the summer of 2022 I chose to invest far more of my time in the hobby and expand my buying and selling operations. Incorporated as an LLC in December 2022, Miller Ancients has quickly grown to be one of the largest ancients-exclusive businesses in the U.S. With thousands of happy customers in all 50 U.S. states and 24 countries abroad, we have sold over 20,000 coins to date.
On this website, my goal is to provide a thoughtfully curated group of ancients at the best fixed prices available for direct buying. I love to work with both seasoned collectors and those new to the field on building great collections that will be treasured for many years and, hopefully, passed down to later generations.
In my years collecting and dealing ancient coins, my personal interests have developed as I've been exposed to more types and periods. At first, I was focused on Eastern Roman/early Byzantine coinage, as I am drawn to the period of the Roman Empire as a Christian state, as well as the murky realities of a declining ancient world order and an ascendant medieval one.
Among the new passions I've discovered is Greek Archaic period coinage – that is, the first electrum issues of Lydia and Ionia (ca. 650 BC) and early Greek coinage that predates the great Persian Wars. Additionally, I am fascinated by the period at the end of the Roman Republic and in the transition to Empire – populated with notable figures such as Julius Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Augustus, and so on. These coins are particularly popular with collectors today, and I constantly try to offer many of these pieces on the website at highly competitive fixed prices. They're a great way to get involved with the most famous names of the ancient world, and suitable companions for anyone reading the page-turning histories of Tacitus, Livy, Suetonius, and so on.