Deinomenid

Where are the coins for sale please? It says nonprofit, noncommercial on the pages I checked. Re owner, you are presumably looking for a Catalan.

Please could you remind me what the column headings are. Second one is dates, is the first Thompson or you? And the 2 columns on the far right.

I'd second @Phil Anthos here. Cunliffe is a serious top academic who writes well (oxymoron?). He also wrote the Very Short Introduction to the Druids, re the above comment on their use of Greek.

If you look at a map of the Mediterranean "upside down" the whole place seems to open up more for a series of Greek settlements. Once you'd rounded the toe of Italy and passed the dastardly Etruscans there was a large natural basin and no obvious necessary divisions into "France" and "Catalonia". Some settlements are well-known, such as Massalia/Marseilles, but also Monoikos/Monaco, Nikea/Nice and Antipolis/Antibes. But not knowing where "France" stopped, trading posts continued into Catalonia, such as Emporion/Empuries and Rhode/Roses [home until not long ago of possibly the most famous restaurant ever, El Bulli]. There are some really interesting Greek coins from some of these cities, but the further west you go, the less research is easily available, partly reflecting output, perceived quality, quantity etc. All this is a long, roundabout way of saying Moneda Iberica is available online and has lots of very good examples of relevant coins. I only realized this from an advert for an upcoming ANS event. https://numismatics.org/the-long-table-series/ in mid May. As Moneda Iberica seems to be interested in non-Greek coins too (!) there are of course also good sections on all sorts of other "Spanish" coins too, Punic, Celtiberian etc - It's in Spanish (how dare they...) but autotranslates really easily. https://monedaiberica.org/ I know it's a somewhat obscure area in Greek coinage, but I thought I'd flag it. Here are a few coins of the area. Please feel free to post similar, comment etc! Emporion (Empúries) Silver, 0.87 g, Diameter 10.4 mm. Obol. 5th century BC Obverse: Two sphinxes facing, their heads joined in a janiform style Reverse: Incuse geometric shape (if you squint) Emporion. 3rd century BC. Hemiobol (Silver, 10 mm, 0.43 g). Laureate head of Apollo to right. Rev. Pellet within crescent. And back east, Massalia. Circa 460-450 BC. Hemiobol (Silver, 9 mm, 0.43g). Archaic head of Apollo to left. Rev. Crab; below, inverted M Fun fact : Julius Caesar (obviously much later than these coins) reported that the Gaulish druids, though preferring to commit to memory, used Greek as their written language of choice. (Commentarii de Bello Gallico, VI.14) The Druids do not go to war, nor pay tribute together with the rest; they have an exemption from military service and a dispensation in all matters. Induced by such great advantages, many embrace this profession of their own accord, and [many] are sent to it by their parents and relations. They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses; accordingly some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing, though in almost all other matters, in their public and private transactions, they use Greek characters. That practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons; because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of the people, nor those who learn, to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory, relying on writing; since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory.

https://www.collector-antiquities.com/about-this-site/introduction.html In case it helps. Contact info there too.

Yep, the wink was a clue! I love this line - "yet he was kindly disposed towards the Athenians, once he had reduced the city to subjection"... And how he "somehow" got an asp bite. He's also the source of a good quote about Athenian bronze. It has often struck our notice that the course our city runs Is the same towards men and money. She has true and worthy sons: She has good and ancient silver, she has good and recent gold. These are coins untouched with alloys; everywhere their fame is told; Not all Hellas holds their equal, not all Barbary far and near. Gold or silver, each well minted, tested each and ringing clear. Yet, we never use them! Others always pass from hand to hand. Sorry brass just struck last week and branded with a wretched brand. So with men we know for upright, blameless lives and noble names. Trained in music and palaestra, freemen's choirs and freemen's games, These we spurn for men of brass...

There's a big new book out on Magna Graecia and Sicilian counterfeit coins, whose entire premise seems to be comparing real coins with fakes and ones by and large sold by Bertolami. The authors carefully point out that Bertolami knew it was selling fakes and marked them as such but the fact that they pump out such vast numbers of "coins to help us study" is such a problem. The book is 250 pages long.... Couple of random pages -

This is a slight possibility, as the bulletin is available to buy (lots of them were recently at auction for example)- it is just expensive. I see their action (lack) as more of a closed shop guild. As with their ~lily-livered response to the Beale situation.

That's a fantastic coin @Ryro! I can't bring myself to participate in ownership given they systematically destroyed most of the mints I'm most fond of in western (and much of the rest of!) Sicily. I know there's no internal logic to that and then owning coins from plenty of other places that did similar. My excuse is when I was a child a long time ago I stayed for a while near Sousse in Tunisia and was really shocked at the tophet we saw on some lane to nowhere (no doubt somewhere now again). I know the stories vacillate between child sacrifice and the expected high infant mortality but back then it was called child sacrifice. Rows on either side of little stone coffins (this was not the tophet of Carthage). That kind of put an early negative spin on them for little me. The section of the Aeneid set there is extraordinarily beautiful nonetheless 🙂. I have coins highly likely minted from captured Carthaginian booty, and others likely from war indemnities exacted from them, but that's little harsh here!

30 seconds on coinarchive has Leu, Roma, Oslo Mynt, Nomos, Solidus, Tauler, Davissons, Baldwins, but there are more. Some are not consistent either. Several times at "tippy-top" houses I've seen it too, and then could not trace it later. I assume similar to @John Conduitt's comment, sometimes they are memory hole'd into nonexistence.

Mot auction houses I follow, from the most exalted to the lowliest, remove either the image or the image and description of withdrawn coins. My (possibly incorrect) assumption is the coins are mostly withdrawn because they are fake and if so it's really frustrating as it makes it so much easier for the coins to pop up for sale elsewhere, plus it removes a way to educate oneself on what to look for etc. Sometimes it seems as if fairly large parts of the professional selling community are actively acting against the full and free sharing of information on forgeries. One obvious example is how despite their (IAPN) professed interest in removing forgeries, they keep the lists hidden and - from what little I have seen - numbers of coins on their special lists don't make it to forgerynetwork etc. "The Bulletin of Counterfeits and the online IBSCC-Archive are restricted to members only" I'm sure there must be a good, fair reason for this apparently Orwellian behaviour, but I'm struggling to see what it is. Also are there any workarounds to the Memory Hole? Wayback engine-type crawls over recent now deleted posts? This sort of thing, with fingers not particularly pointed at the companies on the screenshot. It's almost ubiquitous -

I spent a good 15 minutes tying to persuade and then telling off Claude AI for refusing to acknowledge the existence of Telos. I was trying to find out more about the Gela connection you mention (the Rhodes part is ~ well-known but I had missed that part). It turns out some of the databases are so dogmatic they refuse to link Tilos and Telos. "Unfortunately, I do not have any definitive information about an ancient island called "Telos" that I can confidently provide details about. This name does not ring a bell in terms of my knowledge of ancient Greek geography, history or mythology." That was only the start of it! I wish I had something from Astypalaia, Halki, or Nisyros. (If they are allowed to exist by our AI overlords.) Here's from from Kos though, with a disconcertingly giant-eyed Demeter. Circa 345-340/30 BC. AR Didrachm (18.49mm, 6.57 g, 12h). Ma–, magistrate. Bearded head of Herakles right, wearing lion skin / Veiled head of Demeter left.

She had 473 obverse dies for 3,866 rev at one stage. Not sure how that has changed since. The problem with this and the other question is we usually rely for answers on New Style questions on err @NewStyleKing! 🙂

Agreed! They are a small percentage of the total output. Many congratulations. The temple is something special and likely much older as a sacred site than the city. When I was there, there was a guide loudly proclaiming it Emperor Otto's camp (apparently he was based at it). I wept a little inside 🙂 Nomos, c. 510-470, medium incuse (class ix), meta, ear of barley with six grains, rev. similar but incuse, 7.93g

Of transitional owls? I saw endless “regular” ones but I think op means Starr I-IV by transitional.

It’s supposed that they are the flans as the tongs holding the hidden object are not suitable for the heavier ingot and even the angle and the position of the little creature’s hand make it almost impossible to hold an ingot. Of course all this presupposes a lot of accuracy and knowledge by the painter!

For your questions, if they are general to Greek too there is a great deal of information available which I’m happy to forward. Information and argument! I am told that this wall painting of the Roman period is far from fanciful, aside from the amorini themselves. “ The ‘amorini’ in their workshop: drawing of the fresco in the Vettii house, Pompeii, from T. Ely, ‘The process of coining as seen in a wall painting at Pompeii’

There's something about that coin, assuming you mean the alliance coin. It was unsold in a 2022 auction by them, and had a strange comment about some upcoming publication that as far as I know never happened. Also, the last time they tried to sell it it did not have the "no US purchase" caveat. Despite supposedly being from a pre-1945 collection. Not for me!

I bought one coin in the recent auction and was told the bank account had changed yet again. That's not a great sign. Of course they could have had 3 banks in a year for other reasons, but....

Whoops, I just saw you only mentioned a few books of Diodorus. If you didn't mind his style, there are quite a few other surviving ones too. For western Greek cities (my "area") there are very few strong works that discuss mostly one polis. Taylor's Ancient Naples is excellent but stronger for later years. Redfield's Locrian Maidens for Epizephyrian Lokri is interesting, though he, like most, tends to fall down Orphic rabbit holes. Some of the modern Syracuse ones are awful - the tyrants seem to attract all sorts of speculative rubbish. Noe and Johnston are as good as you'll find on Metapontum. All other major Western poleis have no one superb book on their Greek period (I'd love to learn otherwise, as that's a sweeping statement.) Otherwise it's piecing together a more detailed history from many separate articles on a wide range of themes. Dunbabin - the Western Greeks is "required" general reading though. Finlay and Freeman are both worth a read on general Sicily. Finlay is worth a read on anything. Genius of a man. Elsewhere - Thebes, Cartledge is often recommended, but one of his weakest in my view. His Very Short History of Greece is written in city chapters, so is of some limited use for Massalia, Miletus, Syracuse and a few others. And the coin specialist books can be great for history too, as they (if good) place everything in context. Williams, Phokians, Lorber, Amphipolis, Williams Velia, May for Abdera. For Macedonia there's a strangely good one -Sovereignty and Coinage, by TR Martin. Athens you have plenty of choices, though Seltman is a good start. Sheedy is as good as it gets for the Cyclades. This may sound pretentious, but to get a good overall feel for say Syracuse, reading commentaries on Pindar are often a great source. Or on Empedokles for Akragas or Selinus. It generally seems university output on literature or philosophy is a better source for some of these places as they tend to place their subjects in a proper background context. Ditto say Zeno for Velia or even Pythagoros for Kroton, Archytas for Tarentum etc. And for the possibly risible but actually a good read, there's an old "schoolbook" called A Day in Old Athens, by Davis, where he imagines he wanders around the city and its suburbs, harbour, temples, the nearby hills, the Academy etc. There's something about it that brought that polis to life. For novels @DonnaML recommended Mary Renault in another context, and I read some of her books as a result. One of Renault's lesser-known ones, The Mask of Apollo, has for much of its setting Syracuse from the last days of Dionsyius to Dion and Dionsyius the Younger. And Plato's frequent interaction with the 3. I can't of course tell how accurate it is, but it comes across well. That whole period is fairly confused but it helped me. (Her 2 main books on Theseus are very readable too.) Your The Consolation of Philosophy - Boethius made me smile as that's the book of choice for Ignatius in the wonderful Confederacy of Dunces. "“I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?" "Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers." "Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age," Ignatius said solemnly. "Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. " Now that's a reading list!

If there's one to read that is not on that list, it has to be Thucydides. Not city-specific but a fascinating read.

That's a really lovely portrait. An example below but in case of interest the ruins in the Procul Harum video are of an old stately home you can visit called Witley Court, in Worcestershire. When a younger (even younger) man I've listened to that song late/early in (!) the fountain it shows at around the 1.15 mark, and, aided by other stimuli, it was quite the experience. Some fantastic really old pubs nearby too. Fountain used to be drained - I wasn't entirely gone. (It's also known as the Perseus fountain.) Anyway, a coin! - Campania, Neapolis AR Didrachm. Circa 275-250 BC. Head of nymph to left; TAP below neck, EYΞ behind / Man-headed bull walking to right, head facing, crowned by Nike flying to right above; EΠI below, NЄOΠOΛITΩN in exergue. Sambon 485; HN Italy 586; SNG BnF 767; HGC 1, 454 var. (obv. legends not listed).

Yes, absolutely. Heritage - at least for me - defaults to this https://coins.ha.com/itm/ancients/greek/ancients-sicily-syracuse-agathocles-317-289-bc-el-50-or-25-litrai-15mm-355-gm-9h-ngc-au-5-5-4-5-fine-style-edge-marks-/a/3115-32013.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515

I've looked at all my saved articles on the stars on Greek coins, from Sicily to Thrace, and can't find anything that has Hermes and the 9 pointed star. There are a few specific lengthy ones on the star and symbolism, but nothing, including one with pages of the types but nothing close. I'd love to hear what the answer is.

A lunar rather than solar eclipse arguably cost Athens more dearly than most of her many other aggressions. In 414, Nicias finally realized the Sicilian Expedition he'd been reluctant to lead was a failure and agreed to leave. A lunar eclipse though unnerved him, so he asked his priests what to do. Wait 27 days, he was told. Syracuse attacked his fleet, destroyed it, and with it the only real escape route which led to a rolling series of further military disasters for the aggressors. Plutarch -It is said that the Athenians would not believe their loss, in a great degree because of the person who first brought them news of it. For a certain stranger, it seems, coming to Piraeus, and there sitting in a barber's shop, began to talk of what had happened, as if the Athenians already knew all that had passed; which the barber hearing, before he acquainted anybody else, ran as fast as he could up into the city, addressed himself to the Archons, and presently spread it about in the marketplace. On which, there being everywhere, as may be imagined, terror and consternation, the Archons summoned a general assembly, and there brought in the man and questioned him how he came to know. And he, giving no satisfactory account, was taken for a spreader of false intelligence and a disturber of the city, and was, therefore, fastened to the wheel and racked a long time, till other messengers arrived that related the whole disaster particularly. So hardly was Nicias believed to have suffered the calamity which he had often predicted. A coin likely celebrating the victory - Evans - Upon the reverse Persephone appears guiding with her left hand the reins of her galloping steeds, and in the other holding aloft a flaming torch in place of the usual goad of the charioteer, while Nike, who flies forward to greet her, holds in her left hand the Αφλαστον, or aplustre, the ornament of the poop of one of the captured vessels. The appearance of the Chthonic Goddess on this piece and the manner in which Nike holds the naval trophy towards the burning torch may, perhaps, suggest a reference to a wholesale devotion of the spoils of war by fire to the deities of the Nether World, to which we find more than one reference in ancient writers. SICILY. Syracuse. Second Democracy, 466-405 BC. Tetradrachm, obverse die unsigned, but by Euarchidas; reverse die signed by the engraver Phrygillos, circa 415-405. Quadriga galloping to left, driven by a goddess (Persephone?) holding the reins in her left hand and a torch in her right; above, Nike flying right to crown Persephone with a wreath held in her right hand, while holding an aplustre in her left; in the exergue, grain ear to left. Rev. ΣΥΡΑΚΟΣΙΩΝ Head of Arethusa to left, wearing ampyx and sphendone, triple pendant earring and simple necklace; on ampyx signature of engraver, ΦPΥ; before her head, dolphin swimming downward to right; behind her head and under her neck, three dolphins swimming downwards to left.