The coin at the centre of the story was among a small hoard discovered in 1713. It was thought to have been a genuine Roman coin until the mid-19th century... The final blow came in 1863 when Henry Cohen, the leading coin expert of the time at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, considered the problem for his great catalogue of Roman coins. He said that they were not only 'modern' fakes, but poorly made and "ridiculously imagined". Other specialists agreed and to this day Sponsian has been dismissed in scholarly catalogues...A chemical analysis also showed that the coins had been...
