“Bellum Pollanum”: A Numismatic War of Pens in Eighteenth-Century Vienna and Joseph Eckhel’s First Publication on Ancient Coinage

Abstract This is the first full analysis of a scholarly controversy in the 1760s regarding the authenticity of a bronze coin depicting Vespasia Polla, the mother of the Roman emperor Vespasian. The piece (in the collection of Johann Joseph Hauer in Vienna) was correctly identified as a fake by the Jesuit numismatist Joseph Khell in a 1761 publication. Five years later, the ex-Jesuit Joseph Monsperger defended the coin as genuine in a book written in the collector’s name, thereby triggering a flood of additional articles on the topic. The present contribution, partly based on unpublished archival material, discusses a new specimen of a Polla fake of the same type as Hauer’s and argues that the early Joseph Eckhel participated in the debate: in all probability, he authored a twelve-page-article in support of Khell upon the latter’s request, under the pseudonym “Houyhnhnm,” a name taken from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels . This was Eckhel’s first numismatic publication, which hitherto went unrecognized.