Unknown beauty from Marcianopolis

[Bacchus]

Thank you to all for a very interesting thread.  A wabbit it is then.  Curtis has the unfair advantage of having god-like attribution powers, I would never have thought of linking the "Spanish rabbit" example to this.  A lesson here for me (again!) is that while it is a good idea to focus your own collection it always pays to know everything about everything else as well.

(No takers for the dolphin on the lap theory then  )

-:Bacchus:-

[slokind]

I mistakenly posted in the Nikopolis Demeter thread an aureus of Laelian with a lady personification and a rabbit, apparently derived from the Hadrianic Hispania type.  See it there, or I'll add it here, if you want.  P.L.
And here it is, by request.  Note Curtis's remark at the other thread (Nicopolis Demeter).

[slokind]

I have hunted in vain for a map that shows (really shows) the Haimos range, the sites of Nicopolis and Marcianopolis, and the modern town of Lovech, which is IN the Haimos, more or less south of Nicopolis, all together on one map.  I guess I'd better buy the Barrington atlas before falling in love with another three-digit coin.  I can't get Google World satellite images for Bulgaria, for some reason.    The photos that show how lovely Stara Planina is, on line, just show details, such as waterfalls and streets and stuff, lovely as those are.  Nicopolis itself (there are excavated area photos) is still as flat as Rousse, being relatively close to the River.  But the town of Lovech is right in the mountains, which means it gathers clouds and rains, but here is what I could get showing the setting.  I strongly believe in seeing what places are really like!  Now that this thread is in Numism (I noted today), I shall add this one image.  Pat L.

[Jochen]

What a beautiful addition! I think so should be a living thread!

Thanks Pat!

[Steve Minnoch]

I hope this comes close to ahcieving the effect Pat was after:

Steve

[gordian_guy]

I know that this discussion has moved off from the original and has been on for a while, but only today have I been able to render my Haimos example to a size that is acceptable for uploading. It may be a bit too big as it is but I will try. Anyway, just to show it off. It is not Macrinus or Diadumenian, but a Sept Sev bronze.

c.rhodes

[slokind]

Unlisted!  Gentianus!  The earliest of all known, since Gentianus preceded Tertullus.  A discovery like this is, IMO, important.  And it has the name HAIMOS already (though its identify would be certain even without it). And look, he crosses his legs, his right shank over his left (nearer to us).  Thank you!  What shall we have next?  An Auspex 'Moesia'?  Studying Greek Imperials is as much fun as studying sestertii must have been in the Renaissance.
Pat Lawrence
P.S. 17:52 16 Jan 05
Yes, I ought to have said, a hunting spear, and I shouldn't be surprised if there were an animal on the die, but I've just been through CoinArchives and found no other Haimos issued by Gentianus.  Don't you think they're always hunting spears?  Pat

[Jochen]

I see the spear on Haimos. I think it is not a war spear but for hunting only!

Wonderful found!

[archivum]

I'm attaching a scan of another example of Jochen's "unknown beauty," which displays the same bunny and also the same curious feature above it, a pair of round bumps where the lady is leaning, intrinsically not very comfortable and also not very esthetic.  If you survey the various examples from Markianopolis above -- the same singular features including the bunny don't seem to appeal to Nikopolis, with a Haemus-type all of its own -- where the lady is leaning you can probably see not just two curious head-shaped bumps but two bodies extending below them; whatever we make of the principal lady herself (she starts looking more and more like personified Moesia), these supporting hulks may well refer to the famous twin mountains Rhodope and Haemus, two famed overreachers and incestuous lovers petrified into human-shaped mountains according to Ovid and others *:

Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 6.87-89:
http://etext.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/trans/Metamorph6.htm#480077257

Lodovico Dolce's 16th-c. illustration:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Be37drSr_mMC&pg=PA131&dq=inauthor:ovidio+intitle:trasformationi&lr=&as_brr=1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=0_0

Now there's a mythological type for you!

   * Their shocking adventures were even a subject for pantomime (Lucian, De saltatione 51):

"Thrace, too, has much that is indispensable to the pantomime: of the head of murdered Orpheus, that sang while it floated down the stream upon his lyre; of Haemus and of Rhodope; and of the chastisement of Lycurgus." (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/wl2/wl219.htm)

Ps.-Plutarch (2nd-c. AD?), "De fluviis," reportedly also refers to their offspring (or off-spring), the famed River Hebrus (Kleiner Pauly, short entry on Haimos, most likely misstating the source -- see #46 below), which we may also have on our coin as the wave to their left.   If you think this is cluttered symbolic topography, compare this fraught Severan reverse (Varbanov [Bulg.] 3408 [= Eng. 5174]) from Pautalia in Thrace (something similar from Philippopolis nearby), just a short hike from Markianopolis:
 

[archivum]

I just happened on one fairly definite proof that Jochen's "unknown beauty" has a good deal to do with the woman-turned-mountain Rhodope; see the following scan (from Varbanov [Bulg.] 57) of two rare Philippopolis issues of Antoninus Pius,  both quite clearly captioned .  I don't currently have access to the English Varbanov, or to Varbanov's sources, or to this Imhoof-Blumer citation *, apparently illustrated; can anyone else give a hand so that we can compare the Markianopolis tableau with its Thracian precursors in clearer detail?  As for what that tableau shows or means to suggest, it seems likely to me that the Markianopolis type represents a reworking of the -scene  that I'm presently posting, but the now-doubled armrest (Rhodope and Haemus) lets the lady preside over not just Rhodope but the whole Moesia region more generally.  There is certainly no shortage of symbolic persons as armrests on classical coins, though the point may not be topographical; consider concordia and spes (search-terms run on coinarchives.com/a).
 
    * Varbanov's cited sources:

 1) Moushmov, Philippolis 1924 (Varbanov's reference-list entry 62, also cited by RPC without illustration at http://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coins/7429/, though the RPC entry does hint that this drawing's the best we can get).

 2) Ulrike Peter, ed., Stephanos Numismatikos, Edith Schönert-Geiss Festschrift (Varbanov's reference-list entry 69 -- see this previous posting on Peter's work:

    https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=38878.msg246485#msg246485).

   As for my Imhoof-Blumer citation, Nymphen und Chariten, pp. 171-72, #471, Plate XI rev., it's apparently from Schönert-Geiss's own Bibliographie zur antiken Numismatik Thrakiens und Mösiens (Google Books partial view, searching "Nymphen und Chariten" Rhodope).  I could not find the coins on http://www.philippopolis.e-xtracts.com/; someone else will perhaps have more luck with this.

[wandigeaux (1940 - 2010)]

A photograph of the same example of Pius's  PODOPI coin cited by RPC is shown on Plate 8, #4 (attributed to Paris), illustrating Ulrike Peter's article "Religious-Cultural Identity in Thrace and Moesia Inferior," in Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces,  Howego, et al., ed., pp.107-114.  Those with access to a major research library might profit from plowing through the works cited in her footnotes (and she knows how to transliterate!).  George Spradling

[Akropolis]

Gordian_guy wrote: "It is not Macrinus or Diadumenian, but a Sept Sev bronze."

Slokind wrote:"Unlisted!  Gentianus!  The earliest of all known, since Gentianus preceded Tertullus.  A discovery like this is, IMO, important."

Below is a later one, struck under Gallus. Also quite rare...I think, with a bear springing r. toward a deer fleeing r..
PeteB

[Jochen]

Here is a even more later type where you can see clearly the bear and the fleeing deer. It is the mountain god Haimos too even if his name is not mentioned on the coin.

Best regards

[slokind]

Eager to supplement the drawing in Varb. Bulg., I hastened to provide scans of such photos as there are, which support the drawing in the particulars that concern us here.
It has been said here in other contexts, and first by Pick, that there is indeed a close relationship between the mints of Philippopolis and Nicopolis ad I.  Further, each does have a beautiful mountain range near by (on a clear day): see the map in Reply #29, Rhodope being due south of Philippopolis.  So similarities in token terrain are not surprising.
Besides, there were established ways of doing things, for some of which the prototypes may not have been sculptural.  Pick himself (I'd have to check to be quite sure) suggested a pictorial source for the famous Haimos series.
The reason Rhodope isn't the same kind of figure is that the name is feminine gender, but indeed her seat is rocky and she benignly overlooks Philippopolis to her north.  Also, is Haimos a more woodsy mountain?  No matter, he has to be masculine anyway.
Pautalia's very sanctuary is on a rocky hillside, as several coins show.  I don't really know, since I've never seen the coin in the condition of Jochen's Elagabalus Haimos, whether the reclining figure (on whose identity Ruzicka already has a long bilbiography) is a topographical nymph or the Strymon, though the hairstyle is not that of an 'adult' male river--how big is the Strymon this far upstream?-- and, as a nymph, she might be naked from the waist up, if that's how they thought of her, a wild nature nymph, perhaps?  But only one image that I found, in Wildwinds (attached), might show bare breasts.  I'd love to have the Domna one, which judging from Varbanov's estimated prices is twice as rare as Caracalla's, but the reverse seems to be the same.  The almost 19th-century American explicitness of the products that enriched a city watered by the annual melt off Rhodope and by the metals for which the Balkans are famous always reminds me of some medal celebrating California statehood.
Anyhow, I wouldn't be surprised if the Antonine Rhodope coins didn't prompt Nicopolis and Marcianopolis to issue truly competitive topographicals, and Nicopolis to label her Haimos, even though their mountains are of different grammatical genders.
Pat L.

[archivum]

Thank you, George, for those leads, and these helpful scans, Pat -- as you note, they do point to a kind of a twinning between the two differently named mountain-portrait-coins we've been addressing -- and Jochen, that is definitely a precious and beautiful specimen of one of those types at its finest, though no longer expressly named "Haimos" in this final mode. Shifting back a few years to the start of the Moesian series, while Nikopolis answers the Rhodope-type with a named mountain-type of its own, Markianopolis instead drops the caption from the Rhodope-type but keeps virtually everything else, with two token stone-totems Rhodope and Haemus supporting the regional figure at center, who now takes in both.  At this point, pretty clearly, we are dealing with more than one way of personifying and picturing the famed Thracian mountains Rhodope and Haemus, an impression entirely consistent with the short Kleiner Pauly discussion that I cite above.  Back to Markianopolis and that bunny; what is that bunny doing in the picture at all, and right there at the feet of the figures I think we should see as myth-figures Rhodope and Haemus once they've been transformed?  He is doing what bunnies and hares in old pictures quite often do best, signifying libido; here's what we find in 3rd-c. Philostratus (Imagines 1.6: "For you know, I imagine, what is said of the hare, that it possesses the gift of Aphrodite to an unusual degree"), with this translator's note (Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Library version, from 1931):

"This tradition of the fertility [sic] of the hare is frequently mentioned by ancient writers; cf. Herod. iii. 108; Arist. de gen. anim. 777a32, Hist. anim. 542b31, 574b30, 585a5; Plut. Mor. 829E; Aelian, Hist. anim. 13.12" (http://www.theoi.com/Text/PhilostratusElder1A.html#n17)

Thanks to Google Books we can now access Hercher's (outdated) edition of that pseudo-Plutarch citation (from an essay "De fluviis") directly, and here's what it says of our lovers on pp. 61-62 (= 11.3-4 [my translation]):

"Next to it [the river Strymon] are the mountains Rhodope and Haemus; happening to be brother and sister the two fell in love; he addressed her as "Hera," and she knew her lover as "Zeus."  The dishonored gods [brother and sister as well!] took offense at their conduct, and transformed those two into mountains that now bear their names.  In those mountains rise so-called deep-black incestuous rocks [lithoi philadelphoi] that look like human beings [anthrwpomimoi] ... Thrasyllos speaks of them ... in his Thrakika."  (http://books.google.com/books?id=vHECAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22de+fluviis%22#PPA61,M1)

Joining this with the Metamorphoses citation above, I think we have the key to our Haemus-Rhodope tableau, fuzzy-bunny and all; of course others may still disagree -- why would Markianopolis see fit to put any of this on a coin? -- but the same could be asked of the story of Leda, which nonetheless takes center-stage on a memorable coin.  Worth considering!  archivum

[Jochen]

Thank you for your indepth search and finding of these interesting excerpts! But to my feeling it is a bit over-interpreted if the 'innocent' bunny turns the depiction into an allusion to the sexual sphere.

Best regards

[archivum]

Jochen, you're certainly welcome to your point of view, but remember that doves, swans, and cupids, like bunnies, are traditional sex- or innocence-symbols depending on their actual context, and a context of Haemus-Rhodope transformed on these terms doesn't say much for innocence.  As for over-interpreting here, I'd say my readings actually economize effort, since we no longer need to account for how our topographical bunny came to transfer its interests from Spain; but of course that's another respect where appraisals may differ.

[slokind]

Rabbits nearly overran Spain, hence their presence with Hispania.  Naturally, being rabbits, they did so quite innocently.  College kids used to call 'fast' fraternity boys 'rabbits'.  But putting a rabbit beside Hispania did not mean that Spain was a sexier place than other provinces.  If, as the coins suggest, Nicopolitans not only met bear on Haimos but also shot deer and netted rabbits, well, I'm sure the Spaniards made rabbit stew, too.  (Cajuns, who may take as many nuisancy nutria as they like, tell me that nutria meat isn't as good as rabbit).  Yes, it is Marcianopolis that uses the hare with Moesia, but I imagine that hares were for the taking in the ancient Balkans generally.  I am sure that the prolific fertility of those rodents did not escape the notice of any ancients.  Pat L.

[Bacchus]

The EU Agricultural Structure Survey (for which I do my countrys bit) include rabbits as one of the "farmed animals" so there is still enough "rabbit stew" being made to warrant measurement at a fairly high level.

Malcolm

[archivum]

Thanks to being much-devoted to Eros -- see the Kyzikos coin in response #51 -- hares could stand for fertility too, and on one Gordian issue hares do clearly figure as symbols for Moesia, perhaps for that reason as well as because of the coin-type that we've been discussing:

https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-851
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=6969.msg51516#msg51516

On the other hand, we've been discussing a case where the hare seems to stand at the feet of myth-persons transformed into mountains; if that claim about what's being depicted holds up, I would say that it's under-interpreting not to ask why this particular hare's standing there at their feet and not off on its own.  It's a little distracting to process the sight of a hare right by those person-mimicking stones pseudo-Plutarch remarks on unless the hare has some specific connection with those very stones; person-mimicking stones are odd venues for bunnies even if fruitful mountains are not.  We can either ignore the distinction (and maybe we're meant to, though that's a bit clumsy where other details on this coin most emphatically aren't) or else get what assistance we can from an imagery-guide for the era in question, which is what Philostratus provides us with.  An impossibly cluttered symbolic arrangement?  No more so than Spes-Hope, flower in hand, as an armrest for Concord personified.   But as Freud might have granted without in fact giving much up in the process, some bunnies are doubtless just bunnies, even as some cigars are just that.

[slokind]

Now that is interesting!  Viminacium with a hare (and of course all these 'bunnies' are hares) instead of a lion or a bull for a legionary type.  That is very interesting indeed.  Pity that we don't have Viminacium as early as 217/8.  Pat L.

[archivum]

There is a useful discussion of Rhodope in Roscher's Ausfuehrliches Lexikon of Greek mythology 4.116, which points up these additional leads for whoever is interested:

-- Servius on Aen. 1.317, on the old reading "Hebrum" for "Eurum," describes Hebrus as born of Rhodope and Haemus (Hebrus features by name on another Philippopolis issue = Varbanov [Bulg.] 710); I think Servius is really the source for this detail in the *Kleiner Pauly* as well, rather than ps.-Plutarch "De fluviis."

-- Pick remarks on the Rhodope coin-type in AMNG 1/1, 194 and 342 n. 5; he connects it, though loosely, with most of the coin-types that we've been discussing.

-- The rare Rhodope type also gets a brief notice in Head

http://www.snible.org/coins/hn/thrace.html#Philippopolis

Mionnet

http://books.google.com/books?id=J4ICAAAAYAAJ&printsec=titlepage#PRA1-PA416,M1

and Eckhel

http://books.google.com/books?id=J0n11GxYAN0C&printsec=titlepage#PPA44,M1,

and I'm particularly interested in Eckhel's paraphrase of the entry for this coin in Pierre Seguin's Selecta Numismata Antiqua (ca. 1670),  p. 157 (should be pp. 150-51 *), since it clearly alludes to the metamorphosis-to-mountains that I've been examining: "Existimat Seguinus, figura muliebri sisti Rhodopen Strymonis F[iliam] in montem mutatam."  (A. Tacchella [RN 1902, 177] notes the feminine figure's suggestion of this metamorphosis as well.)

  * See the excerpt now posted thanks to Numerianus at https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=45730.msg288304#msg288304:

[David Atherton]

FWIW, An illustration of what kind of rabbits inhabit Bulgaria:

[Circus_Maximus]

^^ I thought for a second you would be posting a bulgarian ski bunny 

[archivum]

That's not such a bad topical joke -- there are bunnies and then there are bunnies, and this is quite clearly one mountain-variety to reckon with.