Ancient history from coins

Imagine for a moment that all written sources for Rome's conquest of the Hellenistic world had been lost. No Polybius, no Livy, no Cicero; no Illyrian Wars, no treaty of Apamea, no battle of Pydna. Imagine trying to reconstruct the political history of the eastern Mediterranean between, say, 229 and 30 BC from the coin evidence alone. What would Rome's arrival in the Greek East look like? Would we be able to spot the emergence of the earliest Roman provinces in the East, Macedonia from 146, Asia from 129, Syria, Cilicia and Bithynia-Pontus from 64? Whose impact would be most visible – Sulla, Pompey, Augustus?

There can be no doubt what the first coin to catch your eye would be. Around 196 BC, a very unusual issue of gold staters was struck somewhere in Greece, perhaps at Chalcis on Euboea. The ten known examples were struck from no fewer than five different obverse dies (and five reverse dies), suggesting that more than 100,000 coins may originally have been struck (Alföldi 1984; Callataÿ 2011a: 59–61). These coins carry on the obverse a portrait of a bearded male figure, without a diadem (Fig. 9.1). On the reverse, a Nike figure bearing a palm-frond (representing a military victory on land) is shown placing a wreath on the name T. Qvincti.

As the Latin legend on the reverse makes clear, these coins were struck by the great Roman general T. Quinctius Flamininus. Flamininus had defeated Philip V at the battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BC – in effect marking the end of Antigonid Macedon as a major player in the Aegean world – and went on to proclaim the freedom of the mainland Greeks at the Isthmian games at Corinth the following year (Polybius 18.46.5). Flamininus’ declaration of Greek freedom shows how well he had grasped the kind of Philhellenic rhetoric used by Hellenistic kings in their dealings with Greek cities (Walsh 1996); it is no surprise to find him equally able to speak the charismatic ‘language’ of Hellenistic royal coinage.

Aside from the use of Latin for the legend on the reverse, Flamininus’ coinage is modelled on contemporary issues of Hellenistic kings in almost every respect. Although attempts have been made to discern a distinctively ‘Roman’ style to his coin portrait (Kousser 2010: 527–8), this is little more than wishful thinking (Touchette 1992: 244).

This book is an introduction to the coinages of the Hellenistic world, from the campaigns of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC to the Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean. Rich and fascinating as it is, this period poses particular challenges for historians. For much of the Hellenistic era, narrative sources are entirely lacking. The Hellenistic historian therefore has to master a wide range of different kinds of source material: inscriptions, papyri, archaeology, Alexandrian poetry, and of course coinage. The aim of this book is to show how coins can help us to understand the varied societies and cultures of the Greek-speaking world during the last three centuries BC.

The book is structured around four main themes, all of them concepts of central importance in recent work on the period. The first theme (covering Chapters 1 and 2) is globalization. The Macedonian conquest of the Near East created a new monetary ‘world-system’, stretching from northern Gaul to the central Asian steppe. The coinages of Alexander the Great and his early successors served as a kind of common language for monetary cultures throughout this ‘big’ Hellenistic world. Chapters 3 to 5 explore the second major theme of identity. Greek cities, regional leagues, and Hellenized peoples on the fringes of the Graeco-Macedonian world all used coinage as a means of representing their distinctive cultural and political identities. The third theme, discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, is political economy. The use of coined money underwent radical changes during the Hellenistic period, both at the macro-level of state and civic economies, and at the micro-level of coin use by individuals. The fourth and final theme is ideology. In Chapters 8 and 9, we shall look at the representation of power on Hellenistic coins, first by the rulers of the major Graeco-Macedonian kingdoms, and finally by the Romans who succeeded them across much of the Greek-speaking world during the second and first centuries BC. The book also has an unobtrusive forwards motion, travelling from the decades after Alexander's death (Chapter 1) to the organization of Rome's eastern provinces in the last decades of the Roman Republic (Chapter 9).

Like all specialist disciplines, ‘numismatics’ (the study of coins, nomismata in Greek, nummi in Latin) has its own technical jargon: obverse and reverse, dies, weight-standards, denominations and so forth.

Introduction

For one grouchy Athenian orator, Philip II of Macedon's victory over Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in 338 BC was the moment that ‘the affairs of Greece fell into slavery’ (Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 50). Then again, he would say that. For aggressive imperialists like the fourth-century Athenians, the rise of the great Macedonian kingdoms was nothing but bad news (Habicht 1997). Other Greeks saw things differently. The average Greek city had spent two centuries being pushed around by the Athenians, Spartans and Thebans: in small towns like Sicyon, Chalcis and Mytilene, I imagine that the humbling of the Athenians at Chaeronea was met with street parties.

Most Hellenistic Greek poleis enjoyed far more freedom of action than they had ever had in the fifth or fourth century BC (Ma 2000). Hellenistic kings had little reason to meddle with the internal affairs of Greek cities in their zone of influence, and inter-city diplomacy and polis warfare were pursued with a new enthusiasm. Despite the doubts of some modern scholars (Gruen 1984: I, 133–42), when Hellenistic cities celebrated their ‘freedom and autonomy’, they really did mean what they said.

The civic coins struck by Greek cities in this period are vivid evidence of the continuing vitality of civic life and civic identity in the third and second centuries BC. Yet they bring surprises too. In the Aegean and western Asia Minor, city coinages go through periods of sharp decline (such as the early third century BC), alternating with sudden revivals (most obviously in the mid-second century BC). These unexpected rhythms of minting cry out for explanation. Can changes in the volume and character of civic coinages be explained by the cities’ changing relationships with Hellenistic kings? Or did civic mints respond in a pragmatic way to the amount of royal coinage in circulation, striking their own coins only when there was an immediate financial need? Or – the most interesting possibility of all – might we be dealing with a series of positive choices by the cities about how to represent their own civic identity?

The civic coinages of the Hellenistic world are bewildering in their quantity and variety. In this chapter, I shall focus on the city coins of a single region, western Asia Minor and the offshore islands.

The Sinanpaşa hoard

In the early years of the twentieth century, a poor Turkish farmer made his fortune overnight. Somewhere near the modern town of Sinanpaşa, deep in the highlands of central Turkey, the soil gave up an enormous hoard of ancient silver coins, buried there more than 2,200 years earlier (Fig. 1.1). We will never know how many coins the farmer originally dug up from his fields, since the coins were quickly dispersed on the international antiquities market. Still today, this remains the fate of most large coin hoards discovered outside of official excavations. As I write this paragraph, on 15 August 2013, a US coin-dealer called ‘zoderi’ is offering on eBay thirty-two tetradrachms of Alexander the Great, all evidently from a single hoard, for between $320 and $780.

Between 1919 and 1927, the American scholar and collector Edward T. Newell (1886–1941; Fig. 1.2) tracked down hundreds of coins from the Sinanpaşa hoard from coin-dealers in Athens, London and the United States. Thanks to Newell's efforts, we can today identify 670 coins which are known for certain to come from the Sinanpaşa hoard, almost all of them (640 out of 670) now in the collection of the American Numismatic Society in New York (IGCH 1395; Thompson 1983: 86–9).

From the surviving coins, we can be pretty sure that the hoard was buried in 317 or 316 BC. All of the Sinanpaşa coins are drachms on the so-called ‘Attic’ weight-standard (named after the abundant coinage of Classical Athens), weighing around 4.30 g. These drachms all carry the same images on their two faces. The front, or ‘obverse’ face, depicts a bust of Heracles, the legendary ancestor of the Macedonian royal house, wearing a lion-skin headdress. The back, or ‘reverse’, shows a male deity seated on a throne, holding an eagle on his right hand, with the name (in Greek) of a Macedonian king running vertically to the right of the throne. Most of the coins carry the name of the young conqueror who, between 334 and 323 BC, changed the course of world history: Alexander III (‘the Great’) of Macedon (Fig. 1.3).

The Sinanpaşa hoard bears silent witness to the dramatic events which had played out across the whole of the Near East, from the Mediterranean to India, in the twenty years or so before its burial.

Fancy dress and royal ideology

After a hard day's work conquering Persians, a frat party in fancy dress. Here is the historian Ephippus of Olynthus, an eye-witness to Alexander the Great's last years, on the king's unexpected penchant for cross-dressing:

Demetrius Poliorcetes, too, was notorious for his over-the-top clothing, as Plutarch tells us in his gloriously rococo Life of Demetrius:

We need not take these stories too literally. Ephippus, in particular, is a notorious source of scurrilous nonsense. But like most gossip, these anecdotes do capture an essential truth: Hellenistic royal portraiture really does have a hint of fancy dress to it. Alexander was depicted wearing the ram's horns of Ammon, and there is something theatrical about the coin portrait of Demetrius Poliorcetes, with his immaculate Alexander-style mane of hair, improbably handsome youthful features and shining bull's horns (Fig. 8.1). All that Ephippus and Plutarch have done is to take these fantasy royal images, created for mass public consumption, and pretend that this is how the kings actually behaved in real life (Smith 1988: 38–9).