Kamarina - Unionpedia

Hello dear coin community! My boyfriend is super interested in roman/greek history and his only wish for Christmas is an ancient coin. None of us have any experience with collecting coins but I really want to make him happy and be supportive with his hobbies!:)
I found this coin quite beautiful, but I have no clue if it's worth the money or if it's even authentic? : https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/london_ancient_coins/89/product/sicily_kamarina_c_420405_bc__onkia/1374643/Default.aspx
some less expensive ones I'm also considering:
https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/london_ancient_coins/89/product/julia_mamaea_augusta_222235__sestertius__rome__r_felicitas/1341069/Default.aspx
https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/london_ancient_coins/89/product/gallienus_253268_antoninianus__antioch/1299651/Default.aspx
The seller of all three is London Ancient Coins - do you guys know if they are reliable? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thank you :)

Taking the Stars
The subsonic roar of the solid rocket boosters crossed the threshold from noise into motion. To hear it was to feel it, and to feel it was to remember that you were a sack of fluids and gels much more than you were a solid entity. Membranes and gradients, solutes and films: a body was a mingled thing. Mara thought of this as she watches the launch vehicle discard its boosters and climb away through the clouds. The Awoken could have been angels. Instead, they were flesh.
Queen Nguya Pin rose from her portable throne, unfolding two heads taller than Mara. She asked Mara to choose her replacement. Her work was done, and she would stomach no more. Queen Pin knew that Mara had used her to do her dirty work, politically and scientifically. She had used her to bundle up the Gensym Scribes in a neat scroll for her disposal. The queen had gone along with it for the sake of the monarchy, not because she was a fool. She didn't know what Mara wanted or why she was so bent on keeping the Awoken uneasy and dissatisfied. She didn't know how she manipulated the acclamation. But when she abdicated, she was going to find Alis Li, wherever she had gone, and ask her all her questions about Mara.
Mara simply told her that she had been a wonderful queen and no one would ever replace her. Although she was already thinking about Devna Tel, who was never one of the Scribes, and whose coronation would make a wonderful rebuke to the Scribes' remaining ambitions. She recognised that the Queen had too much perspective and her replacement would come in due time.
Sjur Eido met Mara on the ship and gave word to her on the satellite. It was still burning for the Lagrange point. She hoped it would hep the Awoken see things from her own point of view. She smiled as she helped her bodyguard up the ramp, Sjur indulgently pretended that she needs Mara's hand. Uldren was on the ground in Kamarina. They would have a go-ahead on the interferometer buyout when he was done.
There were new stars in the sky now. Mara put them there. Huge distributed-array telescopes orbited the Distributary's cool sun. Out of shell corporations and seed investments, she had opened her world as an enormous eye and focused it heavenward. Sjur Eido was her smiling public avatar these past decades, while her brother handled enforcement. The days of covert speed chess in the Queen's court were over: Sjur Eido's open endorsement made Mara the face of Eccaleism and armed Mara with blackmail over all the Gensym Scribes still in power.
Yet she had never been so lonely or so worried for the future. Her mother had told her that she, Mara, used her power over Uldren too freely; that she must learn to stop, or her mother would no longer be her friend. But the satellite was in the sky now, and they would find the proof that it was time for them to go home. Proof of what she had known since the beginning. Sjur knew Mara well now. But she frowned in thought. She didn't remember much from before her awakening. Few of the 891 did. But she knew enough to trouble her.
The ship's turbines keened up to speed and then settled into whisper-quiet cruise. Sjur reached to strap herself in across from Mara. Impulsively, hard-faced, denying she needed what she was asking for, Mara scooted aside to make room on her bench. Sjur raised an eyebrow at her. They passed the flight in silence, but not alone.
They were waiting on her, the Distributary's millions, her Awoken people. She had stoked their curiosity with thirty years of painstaking analysis. When they looked up at the night sky, they saw the stars of her observatories among the crowded bands of habitats, the spindly orbital factories, towering elevator counterweights, the burning roads of matter streams.
"Let me tell you of our world," she says.
"No infants died last year. No child went unfed. No youth came of age illiterate, no one suffered illness who might have been treated. We have long surpassed the eutech gathered from Shipspire; yet we have grown carefully and cleanly. We have eluded pollution, eradicated plague, and chosen peace. No maltech weapon has been discharged in centuries. Our atomic weapons were dismantled before they could ever be used. We are our own triumph."
"Let me tell you of your cosmos," she says.
"We lived in a spatially infinite, isotropic universe 12.1 billion years old. Its metallicity is ideal for life and for the spread of technological civilisations. In time, the distance between all points in the universe will contract to zero, and the cosmos will collapse into a singularity, to be reborn in fire. There will be no end to eternity here."
The whole world was out there, begging for the answer to the question. Their world, their Distributary, it was a gift. And they must refuse it. They were Awoken. They love secrets. They would have to wait for her to explain.
They had detected a pattern that was imprinted into their universe by their ancestors: a fingerprint of the initial conditions into which existence was born. From this information, they had confirmed the most primordial of Awoken myths. Their universe was a subset of another. They lived within a singularity, a knot in space-time, that orbited a star in another world.
Conventional relativity would suggest that time outside an event horizon passes quickly compared to a clock within, but our universe has a peculiar relationship with its mother. Thousands of years have passed for us on the Distributary. Outside? Centuries, at most. We are a swift eddy in a slow river.
These ideas may not have surprise them after centuries of theorising and philosophy. But they have decrypted new data from the cosmic microwave and neutrino background signals. They had discovered voices… the voices of distress calls. They told a story of bravery, of war, and of desperate loss.
The Awoken were not always immortal. They did not earn this utopia by covenant with any cosmic power, or by attaining an enlightened moral condition. They were refugees. They fled from an apocalyptic clash between their ancestors' civilisation and an invading power. The signals they had retrieved told them that their ancestors were on the edge of defeat. Perhaps extinction.
The time outside their event horizon passed quickly compared to the clock within, but their universe had a peculiar relationship with its mother. Thousands of years had passed for them on the Distributary. But outside, it was centuries at most.
It was time that they would accept their debt. The Distributary was a refuse, not a birthright; a base to rebuild their strength, not a garden to tend. She asked the Awoken to join her in the hardest and most worthy task a people had ever faced. They would leave their heaven, return to the world of their ancestors, and take up the works they abandoned. They would offer aid to those who survived, and share their strength if humanity had enemies. They must go back to the war they fled and face their enemies.
They had also determined that their birthright, their immortality, was tied to the fundamental traits of their universe. Once they left, they would begin to age again. In time, they would all die.
"Will you join me, Awoken? Will you answer my call? All I offer you is hardship and death. All I ask is everything you can offer. But you will see an older starlight. You will walk in a deeper dark than this world has ever known."
Nasan was standing in a crown of thousands when Mara told the Awoken about the dying world they abandoned. The idea sucker-punched her - one crippling jab to every tender part of her. For four sleepless nights, she could scarcely draw a breath without gulping. She held her silver jar to her forehead, focusing on its cool constant weight, and knew that she must leave.
Mara visited Alis Li's retreat, the sanctuary of former Queens. It was far too late to stop her project now. Far, far too late for second thoughts: exactly twelve point one billion years too late, really. For Mara in particular. Alis Li said to Mara "A Scribe once told me that the definition of a utopia is a place where every single person's happiness is necessary to everyone else. You're going to make a lot of unhappy people, Mara. You'll make the lives of everyone in the world tangibly worse. Not just those you've lured to certain death, but those who will grieve their departure, and all those who will come to grief for lack of labour and knowledge you took with you."
Devna Tel, the newest Queen, had declined to endorse her expedition. Declined to endorse the sudden violent severance of tens of thousands of threads from the tapestry of their society. Mara would argue that her people had volunteered. But Alis reminded her of her mother's words, "that it is one thing for you to have a particular power over people, but another thing entirely to deny that you are using it."
Mara countered "You once told me that I had to consider the symbol people made out of me, and that if it were good, then I had to be that symbol for them. I had to perform as they required. I have done so. I have been the best thing I can think to be."
Mara had worked for many hundreds of years to arrange this outcome. She had nurtured and tended the Eccaleist belief so that there would always be Awoken who felt uncomfortable in paradise. They would feel guilty for the gift of existence in the Distributary. So people would come with her. The Diasyrm. the Theodicy War. She had arranged it all.
She had convinced tens of thousands of Awoken to abandon their immortality. She had deprived the Distributary an infinite quantity of joy, companionship, labour, and discovery: all the works that might be accomplished by all the people who will join her in her mission to another world. When she lay awake at night, seized by anxiety, she tried to tally up the loss in her head, but it was too huge, and it became a formless thing that stalked her down the pathways of her bones like the creak of a gravity wave.
She argued that some infinities were larger that others. She believed that they were here for a reason, and this was the way to fulfill that purpose. The Awoken were meant to die for their purpose. For their fate. For a home they abandoned.
Mara had come to Alis to ask for the boon she owed her. The boon she asked was for her forgiveness. She told Alis the truth. That she, Mara, was in fact first. That she had made the Awoken people believe it was all Alis, but it was all her. When she'd finished, her ancient captain's jaw trembled. Her hands shook. The oldest woman in the world conjured up all the grief she had ever felt, and still it was not enough to match Mara's crime.
"You're the devil," Alis Li whispered. "I remember… in one of the old tongues, Mara means death. Oh, that's too perfect. That's too much." She laughed for a while. Mara closed her eyes and waited. "You realise," Alis Li said, breathing hard, "that this is the worst thing ever done. Worse than stealing a few thousand people from heaven. Worse than that thing we fled, before we were Awoken—"
Alis would support her fleet. She would use every favour and connection she had to get her hulls completed and through the gateway - and she would do it so that she could hasten Mara's departure from the world. She would do it out of hate for her. There would be no forgiveness. What Mara did was unforgiveable.
Devna Tel, last of her name, who held the throne when Sky and the Deep came to the Awoken to collect their terms, chose to stay. Those faithful to Mara condemned Queen Tel's choice, stating that she was cowardly and selfish; she chose to luxuriate in paradise when she knew she could have stood to change fate.
Mara's mother also informed her that she was not coming with her. Mara had been afraid of the answer. It was surely a nightmare. She was happy in heaven and Mara tried to convince her, but it was a conversation with no catharsis or closure. Uldren refused to say goodbye and left without speaking to her.
Nasan found her old friend Sjur. Amid the feverish departure preparations, there was somehow time for an introduction to Mara. Nasan made a pledge of herself and her skills. She promised to do what she could to convince those who might stay behind to come with them. But Mara told her that she would not ask that of her or anyone else. She asked Nasan to help those who had already made their choice, whatever it was. To help them with grief.
Mara thought of the banyan trees that sprawled across the shallow silty lakes of a world she would never see again. The waveguides in her helmet detected the image and obeyed the encrypteded command scheme she'd rooted into every system in her fleet. She spoke into the flight directorate channel.
As her flight controllers confirmed the state of their technical domains, Mara looked out into space through the synthetic gaze of her sensorium. The Hulls gleamed in the stark blue-white light of the star, each ship a silver seedpod braced by immense structural members and cocooned in reservoirs of spectrally adaptive smart fluid: theoretically enough to survive the horrible forces of transit through a singularity.
Mara ordered herself not to crane her neck, but she did it anyway and got a terrible cramp as she searched the sky for the Distributary. There it was. The world of her rebirth, shining water-blue and beautiful, wrapped like a gyroscope in its twin rings. World of laughing Corsairs, world of breathless forest hunts, world of mountains flickering with pale Cherenkov fire, world of sweet berry-stained lips and mathematical insight pure as a rhodium chime. She would never see it again.
Mara thought of her mother. She didn't want to but she did, and the memory blindfolded her and muzzled her and plugged her ears so she could hear nothing but Osana's voice on that final night. They're tipsy together, and the evening had wrapped around to morning. Now they sat side by side, mother and daughter, watching the sun rise over the Chriseiad range from Osana's little ranch house on the tundra.
Her mother had told her that she wasn't coming with her. Mara had been so afraid of that answer for so long that she'd actually giggled. It was a nightmare; one of those stress dreams where your powers of persuasion and manipulation fell. Uldren had refused to speak to her. She was happy in the Distributary. There was no catharsis. No closure.
Sjur sensed missiles trying to intercept them. Someone had tried to stop the departure, someone good and Paladin-pure who believed they were saving tens of thousands of Awoken from madness and doom. Five or six missiles would get through at least. They would lose hulls. They braced for acceleration and Mara thought of her mother's face. She tried to open a channel to her, but as the hulls plunge into the singularity, the last thing Mara saw was the mournful error message: No connection. No connection. No connection. Cannot connect to Osana.
The exodus was absolute in its terror. Nasan had never felt such a profound sense of schism - not when leaving lovers, nor communities, nor cherished hiding place. As the Distributary shrunk behind their Hulls, she looked down at the little silver jar in her hands and wondered who she left behind in the world they were returning to protect. She wondered if they might still be alive.
Schism
Here in this time without time, pocketed by the ever-scattering cosm, touched as an assassin touches the gun in the secret fold. There was an eon within, though they were going without. This was where they belonged, interstitial, in that space between. That was where truth collapsed supercritical.
There was a war, and its name was existence. Mara believed there were two ways to fight - one was with the sword, and one was the bomb.
By the sword, she meant the way to fight that was tempered and solid. The way that was made from old things and that triumphed by the reduction to simplicity. This way was known to those who studied the cosmos. If you took any part of it at any time, you would see an edge and say, "This is a weapon."
By the bomb, she meant that way of being that was complex and schematic and that must attain a criticality to attack. The way that was made from new things and that triumphed by the arrangement of intricacy. This way was known to those who studied themselves. If you took any component of the bomb in isolation, you would say, "What is this? I cannot understand its purpose." Yet in it was the possibility of a fire.
Numberless were the space that surrounded the universe. Subordinate and superordinate were their relationships to the intrinsic world-that-was-only-itself. The Awoken passed through analogy space that would reify what was once subject into object. The power that Mara held, which was agonist to a mother's rapprochement, would be realised and reified.
First was the awareness of her vector, which all who followed her held in their hearts. Second was the desire to hear her speech, which all who followed her curled in their ears. Third was the existence-at-the-fault, which was the inner tension that all who followed her still sensed.
The Awoken people had risen from man and fallen from heaven. They were made again in the fall. What they once were they would not ever be again. Mara was the uncrowned ever-Queen and her only diadem would be the event horizon of the universe, which was her domain. By falling, she would rise. Others sung a song of Light and Dark. But together, they will have transcended such unimaginative limitations.
There were uncountable number of ways to be between zero and two.

I mean things like these:

• The 'battle' of the Caudine Forks (told by Livy): A battle between the Romans and Samnites with no casualties as the Samnites tricked the Romans into entering the Caudine Forks (a narrow mountain pass) by making them believe that a nearby city was under attack - they then barricaded both ends of the pass and the Roman army was stuck without access to food and water and thus forced to surrender. The Samnites then had to decide what to do with the captive Roman army - free them or kill them, they decided (according to Livy) to free them but humiliate them by forcing them under a yoke, this was the worst possible decision as it left the Romans a threat but also angered them. The story is used to illustrate the principle that you should either completely obliterate your enemy so that they are no longer a threat, or completely placate them to make them your friend as the 'middle way' just gets the worst of both worlds - it was used to criticise the Treaty of Versailles. Also, sometimes the Caudine Forks are just used to mean a hazardous/treacherous path likely to result in failure.
  
• The Marsh of Kamarina (told by Strabo): The inhabitants of Kamerina had problems with disease and thus decided to drain the nearby marsh (as swamps were believed to cause disease). However the swamp was also preventing the Carthaginians from attacking the City, upon it's drainage they attacked the City and slaughtered the inhabitants. The story is used as a warning that sometimes removing a problem can expose you to a greater one.
  

I'm sure there must be many other such stories that are used to convey certain points and referenced in texts etc. I find them interesting to learn about - so I was wondering if anyone knows any more?