Deinomenid

Satire seems to have been regarded as a lower form of wit by “many” at the time. Also some of his comments (Scoop etc) probably didn’t help the cause though of course Kipling - somewhat earlier- escaped with similar and won the prize. A huge pity though re Waugh. @JeandAcre that’s an extraordinarily evocative piece. Many congratulations!

On the specifics of your post, you say Greek and with historical context. The later the better in general then. While Greek cities were indeed like frogs round the Mediterranean pond from an early date, if you go early (realistically 550BC at the earliest) there’s not a lot of clear history. Your context is going to rapidly descend (ascend?) into archeology, inference, interpretation of later texts etc. And for the next 100 years or so, very broadly, your point of maximum gravity historically is going to be Athen, its foreign ventures and how other poleis interacted with it, with added potted histories of those places. Lots and lots of Thucydides and Herodotus with a bit of Xenophon! From then and onwards the historical context gets way easier and broader. I imagine for the Roman Republic (the other area you mention) these are far smaller issues as the level and depth of knowledge appears to be so much the greater . But I don’t do modern history, so am not sure 😀

As far as I know, the earliest queen on a western Greek coin. Likely with more than a nod to Arsinoe. Philistis, named on the reverse, wife of Hieron II. Hieron II, 275-216 BC. BC, for Philistis. 16 Litrai ~240/216 BC. BC Veiled head of Philistis, behind star / Nike in slow quadriga, above star, K in field to right. Her name is also very clear on the superb theatre above Syracuse. (not my photo)

In case it helps looking for these coins, it is often (ha!) spelled Euippe. The British Museum has none under Euhippe, but if you try Euippe some come up. They have some really frustratingly specific names for mints. The BNF has a few similar coins. Several were donated by William Waddington, a straightforward English name but the French ambassador to the UK amongst many other roles. Here's one with a ~similar Zeus on the throne (facing the other way) and eagle, sadly with a date range that spans half of our planet's existence. https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb41778982v

@Ryro fantastic crab! I may have watched that quite a few times! Here's an early Syracuse didrachm before and after. Mine's the after...

The history of Dionysos is fascinating! There's a superb shortish book called Dionysos -Myth and Cult by by Walter Otto, one of the most learned scholars on the Greek gods, which is almost a New Testament to Dionysos. It's really odd, in that Otto was a leading academic, and he swore the book was not a "gospel" to the god, but boy does it read like it is. He discusses him as a reality, as an entity that existed, revealing his godhead etc, and given Dionsyos represents so much that is mad, other, frenzied, utterly appalling to women despite being surrounded by them, that can be more a little disconcerting! Nonnus's curious epic poem is discussed at some length of course. Don't tempt him. He is a twice-born god! 🙂 And a god of much worse than wine. But you asked for coins....not too surprisingly there are not that many featuring him from the early major mints, at least in the western colonies. Naxos of Sicily is possibly one of the best known. This is one of the very earliest coins of the area, and unlike many coins of the time has a "worked" reverse. SICILY. Naxos. Litra (Circa 530BC). Obv: Archaic head of Dionysos left, wearing ivy wreath. Rev: NAXION (retrograde). Grape bunch. Weight: 0.71 g. Diameter: 11 mm.

The study I reference indeed has this issue. So there are 2 of them. One more of numismatist, the other the stat and coder person. They co-presented. It sounds like it would be a bit of a curate's egg if it were just one of them... Exactly! They spent some time on this. Related, there were questions about how it could work given not every coin is incredibly perfectly photoed and their answer was to filter DOWN to an acceptable but informative level. Yes, except for oddities that get thrown in by mistake, but these are flagged and manually reviewed. This was one of the reasons they said a given study would take 2 weeks rather than 90 seconds on a laptop. This was a focus of some concern and there was a work-around they had. I am sorry I can't remember what it was in all cases, but in some it was in the small manual section. I'm in over my head here, so should probably shut up. One last incredibly broad point of interest to a layman like me was that the stats/computer code man said specifically that some of the initial impetus for their work was from studies in life sciences (as above) on working out how many - his example - insect species remain undiscovered in the Amazon.

I'm not sure if it helps but Kunker are selling a similar coin which appears to my wholly untrained eye to have very similar script, which may be easier to decipher. The auction house does not attempt to though! They say "With his raised left hand, Apollo grasps his typical laurel staff, alluding to his love affair with Daphne. Behind Apollo, there is a reference to the minting authority of this coin in Sidetic script and language (not in Pamphylian, as is often read), indicating that this coin was issued by Side."

On his way west, he probably stopped here, in Emporion, now Spain but then the next "main" Greek base west of Marseilles/Massalia. Obverse : Man-headed bull protome Reverse : Geometric incuse Obol, 5th century BC, Emporion Silver Weight 0.90 g, Diameter 10.5 mm

Yes. The Empire welcomes you (back). Numiswiki - Although crystallization is the popular term used to describe this fragile condition, the term is a misnomer. Granularization or embrittlement are perhaps better terms (but not customary). Embrittlement of silver has been studied for a long time. It is the cause of some concern in museums holding archaeological silver and in archaeology itself. Embrittlement seems to be linked to inter-crystalline corrosion (see Ravitch, Lehmann, Organ, and Werner). Inter-crystalline corrosion can be exacerbated by the alloying elements present in the silver. Copper and lead are commonly encountered in brittle silver (Lehmann, Bhowmik, Toda, Thompson) but bismuth has also been detected (Rematullah). Discontinuous preservation of copper at the edges of the silver grains can also lead to embrittlement. Lead can make silver brittle even without corrosion (Toda).

Yes, the coin from the first post. The Calgary one.

Crystallisation is apparently very difficult but possible to do with the right mix. The mix has to be really quite pure silver. You can (if you know what you are doing!) force the process by adding tiny quantities of less noble metals to the mix (the mix is acting as a sort of battery) and the less noble will corrode giving a crystalline appearance. I think (from bitter recent experience) that crystallization is more often used as a tick/check mark in partially verifying a coin. In my case there were a number of issues, one of which was a lack of crystallisation when it is common to actually have it (Neapolis, Macedonia). If it HAD been crystallized then it would have removed one of the concerns, been very influential, but not wholly proven the case. [I know this only answers one of the various questions, and I suppose I should add fake crystallisation by use of acid etc...] When I was doing my own coin postmortem, I found these explanations quite helpful though not specifically on ease of forging. https://www.forumancientcoins.com/moonmoth/crystal_coins.html (The author elsewhere said he'd almost never seen it on a fake but put that down to probably a lack of effort. So the coin you highlight is very unusual.)

My strong impression was absolutely NOT that they were putting down manual die studies. It was just that it was a near Herculean task to perform them in any number given the vast quantities. However, I have no pony in the game, I was just reporting on what they said. Usually I'm rather suspicious of a new and improved anything. I've gone through manual die studies at some length in some of "my" areas, and they are often difficult to even follow, and that's with relatively tiny number of coins in eastern Sicilian mints 🙂. Also there was nothing but politeness to other approaches - indeed Messrs W. Esty and A. Turing were mentioned in the same breath!

Here are a horse, a grasshopper and a griffin all leaping left. (If grasshoppers can leap. Assuming griffins could...) Sicily. Kainon. AE 23 mm. c. 360-340 BC. Obv. Griffin springing left; below, grasshopper left. Rev. Horse prancing left; above, star. HGC 2 509; CNS I 10. AE. 7.55 g. 23.1 mm.

I am off-piste here, but I attended a lecture at Oxford yesterday where researchers said they had made very substantial progress in die-linking the staggeringly vast numbers of Roman Imperial (and Republican) coins. I have seen other similar claims, but with the presumed gentle blessing of the Ashmolean, the introduction by the new Keeper of Coins, various luminaries etc nodding away I'm assuming it was not a fly-by-night effort. The quick version is that through extensive automated image analysis combined with numismatic skill to help the process (relevant landmark points on coins, manually checking the small percentage of queries etc) and crucially through specifically Bayesian modeling they have been able to slash the time taken to perform a given Emperor die study. The view is that Esty, Bransbourg, Crawford etc either take or explicitly assume a frequency based approach, with its many suppositions with the result that manual die studies would be needed instead but as Crawford said "The practical problem is that to count all the dies used to strike during the Republic would be the work of several lifetimes". It was all very polite, but their view was the frequentist approach especially with subjective overlays by some (die life, wear, inferences over historical periods (Crepusius?), vagaries of the archeological process etc) was substantially inferior. I had seen a couple of articles on this online in the past (they are Germans working for the National University of Singapore/Yale/Cornell) but had been sceptical until I saw this. Their point seemed to be just to try to make the backbreaking work of die studies easier and therefore give better data for everyone to go and have the arguments over, though reading between the lines their hope seemed to be to demonstrate the true extraordinary scale of monetization of the economy with some sort of birth of capitalism inference. There were lots of questions - nothing really challenging it as an approach - & a couple of comments at the end along the lines of Bob's used this for his work on post-reform Neronioan aurei production but as a mere Sicilian coin fanboy this was all a bit err Greek to me. I just flag it here in case this comes up more generally a) that there is hope for all of you yearning deep in your souls for effective die studies and b) to take this approach with possibly less scepticism as it seems likely it will be used more in the field. The main oddity to me was that they did not review any specific study they had completed... ......................... Some links in case of interest. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00290 which calls it unsupervised deep learning for die analysis, but as above there *is* pre- and post- supervision. One of the 2 authors - https://fass.nus.edu.sg/events/fass-brown-bag-seminar-quantifying-roman-the-money-supply-towards-a-genealogy-of-capitalism/ Cohesion and Repulsion in Bayesian Distance Clustering https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2023.2191821 (they said the academic approach came initially from life sciences)

I checked and apparently it's not live yet. But the plan is to be, it is being worked on, as in it's not one of those half-funded EU research project corpses rotting away on the web!

Fun fact, this is disputed for supernatural reasons***, but as I said earlier Kraay's Coinage of Sybaris can be read interchangeably with Thurium for the early coins of the latter/late coins of the former, so there is a clear continuum at least initially before the falling out. And that Rutter thinks Thurium was very early to strike bronze. So yes, I agree and think possible that they minted bronze soon after they were founded. The likelihood of this coin being super-early is probably not high but if it were I'd be delighted for you. There are some stormy debates on other sites about all this so to take your coin and date it early is bold, so I hope fortune favours you! On the specific coin you mention from NAC, they are ultra-reputable and Russo said he is best who makes fewest mistakes, but for some reason it has been not widely included in analyses. I don't know if it is because it is specifically disputed or just seen as puzzling that there's only one. I own a very rare coin that is extremely similar to the one you show except silver, of the exact same assumed date (NAC's dating is a real assumption btw as it could be said to be a little later). It's the same basic "message" though in Athena head, bull (nod to Sybaris) to right, head to left. Here, with a slightly longer ethnic - ***Sybaris I-IV though not V is really confusing not just because of the difficult archeology notwithstanding Diodorus' site claim but also because of the usual conflicting accounts. It was said though that there were religious reasons the city was not rebuilt exactly where S1 was, which are based on stories of deprecatory rites care of Kroton. This has been somewhat backed by the fact that Perikles sent Lampon as one of his two cofounders of Thurium, with the suggestion being that they needed a soothsayer/oracle interpreter to help against those rites. All a bit odd/unnerving! Just re the French article, he pushes his dates a bit to fit his thesis, pushing Rutter early on Rhegion! Which made me think, why not ask him? Rutter, not the independent researcher 🙂. He's definitely in favour of an early date and I hope that's right. https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/keith-rutter Good luck!

Annoyingly, they are all mixed in with the other essays, and there's no way to find them short of reading the whole thing, but all the subessays are available online as pdfs at academia.edu and elsewhere so are more easily searchable. Good luck!

You probably know it, but there's a huge study, White Gold, that in a series of essays covers this a few times. The book -or vast tome - has no index though so it might be easier to look through the different subessays online. No-one knows what they were or what they were for, and there are endless debates, even really just squabbles about it. Apparently the occasional early Lydian coins had as many as 18 countermarks, which to me makes most likely that they were owner marks. A.R. Bellinger has a good essay on them in the Robinson festschrift and he was fairly sure they were owners' marks though maybe I'm just suggesting work that matches my prejudice. The key seems to be that why would there be so many marks if they were from money changers to mark them as acceptable currency, but that's disputed... Why it would be disputed is beyond me though as fourrees can have a number of different marks too. Even Kraay vacillates, saying they were likely money changer marks but also saying similar marks on darics etc are possibly owner marks. Short answer is no-one knows and it's up to one's common sense to decide the likeliest reason. Here's a fairly early one of mine with a couple of marks... LYDIA. ALYATTES OR WALWET, ca. 610-546 BC. Electrum trite (1/3 stater), 4.71 g, 12 mm. Uninscribed issue of Sardes. Weidauer Group XVI, 89

Re specific literature there's not much I'm aware of but I would love to be mistaken as it's a bit frustrating. Rutter has some comments on the bronze types of Thurium. I can't remember the exact source by it may have been his essays on Athens in the west, which is a bit of an acquired taste as evidence gets well-flogged for results. But they were, absolutely, early to mint bronze. May also have been his Historia Nummorum, Italy. Sorry, just have it in my notes as Rutter on Thurium bronze. On dating your coin to as early as 443BC though, that's truly early for a struck western Greek coin, even though Rutter says Thurium was early to bronze. There are some experts who'd die on hills about that sort of date 🙂 Kraay's Coinage of Sybaris can be read interchangeably with Thurium for the early coins of the latter/late coins of the former but there's little on bronze. By the way, if you ever want to look these coins up at the BMC, they use the incredibly specific term of "Thurii Copia" to access the coins. About as unhelpful as you can get!

Is the claim in the new Harlan Berk book that Starr Group II to V is a much more compressed one contentious please? He says that there are Group V and Group II hybrids and there is therefore general redating or compression of date range. I didn't know he was particularly expert on those coins, other than through a very long ancients career. It's presented rather as a fait accompli, presumably with no chance of a fake coin (?). Screen shot below - especially coin 11 - and discussion at ~38.00 here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6f-tpeW3d0

The new Harlan Berk book says the marks (he uses the w or shin or sh example and makes clear to his son on the podcast it's not a sigma but a w) are absolutely deliberate. Just in case it's of help! I asked another question about that podcast separately. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6f-tpeW3d0 About 38.45

I'd check with the seller as there are 2 approaches there to the rules. A few stick to some very specific interpretation of the process but others absolutely do not. I've had any order from there delivered very quickly (to the US).

Can't let this one pass without a nod to Syracuse utterly destroying a huge Athenian army and navy (and with Spartan help), the last running battle of which dwarfed the above mainland battles so I'll let the main man speak! - "This was the greatest Hellenic achievement of any in this war, or, in my opinion, in Hellenic history; at once most glorious to the victors, and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army - everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (I.7.87) The final battle for Syracuse in 414 was staggering for how many Athenians were defeated, killed, and enslaved. Much as there is a lot to despise about Athens (possibly not a popular view!) in that ~ period, and not just if you were from Melos or looking at the mindset behind the first day of the Mytilenean debate, it's hard not to be slightly affected by the vast scale of their slaughter at the hands of Syracuse and their Spartan general Gylippus. In September 414 many hundreds were killed just outside the city , and 6000 troops were surrendered by Demosthenes, and in the same moving battle Nicias lost maybe 20,000 men (plus up to 15,000 assorted auxiliaries, camp followers etc) in a huge slaughter. What makes it moving - aside from the abstract numbers -is you can still visit the quarries where the remaining Athenian troops (possibly 7,000) were kept, abused, had rocks hurled at them etc. The quarries are vast, and some have recent orange groves in them now as a sort of memorial. "The prisoners in the quarries were at first hardly treated by the Syracusans. Crowded without any roof to cover them, the heat of the sun and the stifling closeness of the air tormented them during the day, and then the nights which came on autumnal and chilly, made them ill by the violence of the change; besides, as they had to do everything in the same place for want of room, and the bodies of those who died of their wounds or from the variation in the temperature, or from similar causes, were left heaped together one upon another, intolerable stenches arose; while hunger and thirst never ceased to afflict them, each man during eight months having only half a pint of water and a pint of corn given him daily. In short, no single suffering to be apprehended by men thrust into such a place was spared them. For some seventy days they thus lived all together, after which all, except the Athenians and any Siceliots or Italiots who had joined in the expedition, were sold. The total number of prisoners taken it would be difficult to state exactly, but it could not have been less than seven thousand. This was the greatest Hellenic achievement of any in this war, or, in my opinion, in Hellenic history; at once most glorious to the victors, and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army—everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Such were the events in Sicily." Not my photos as I think mine might be from technically off limit areas by accident - These numbers for the battle EXCLUDE the huge losses from the destruction of their fleet the same week. There's endless debate about which coins precisely celebrate this victory but this is one is a highly likely candidate, based on the dating and the probable naval significance of the reverse exergue. It's also double signed, though nothing relevant to the above can be read into that, much as I torture the information. Silver Syracuse tetradrachm signed by the engravers Euth... and Phrygillos around 413-410. Head of the nymph Arethusa on the left, hair raised and held by a cord. It is adorned with a necklace adorned with a lion's head, Around it, four dolphins and the legend ΣYPAKOΣIΩN. Below, ΦPYΓIΛΛ/OΣ (artist's signature). R/. Winged Nike leading a quadriga and crowned with victory. On the exergue, Scylla swimming to the right and holding a trident that points to a fish. Behind, a dolphin swimming on the right. EYΘ (signature) below the baseline.

Thank you. And just for the record Leu were excellent about it. I had no idea what to expect, but they were completely helpful. Refund/credit whatever I wanted, their fedex details etc.