About

The Lelouch Collection is my personal collection of ancient coins, mostly Greek, and mostly small silver fractions. It holds 230 Greek coins from 60 mints across 23 regions, spanning 550 BC – 100 BC.

It started with an Etruscan silver coin from Populonia with a six-tentacled octopus on it. I hadn't read the size when I bought it, and when it arrived I was flabbergasted at how small it was: 10 mm and barely a gram. Since then I have collected fractions almost exclusively, and octopus fractions above all.

The octopus is what led me to Syracuse. Its litras pair the head of the nymph Arethusa with an octopus on the reverse, and through them I fell in love with Arethusa and with Syracuse itself, which is why so much of the collection and the articles here centre on Sicily. My favourite coin is one of those litras, barely 12 mm across, with an octopus so finely engraved you can follow every crossing tentacle; its reverse is the site's logo.

Every coin has its own page with obverse and reverse photography, weight, diameter and die axis, catalog references and as much of its provenance as I can trace through old auctions and publications. Browse them in the Greek coins catalog, or see the whole collection on the timeline.

The site also publishes essays on coins in the collection and full translations of older die studies, chiefly on Syracuse and Sicily, with their catalogs illustrated. The library lists every study I have republished, and the bibliography gives full citations for every catalog abbreviation used on the coin pages.