A new acquisition to my
collection, acquired from
eBay where it was described as "uncertain
Cilicia". It took me some effort to identify due to the worn condition and almost illegible legends, but it was clear that the
reverse doesn't show any emperor or normal deity but rather a philosopher or poet. That would have been exciting enough, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it is none of the usual philosophers or poets but the "
pater historiae", as Cicerco called him: Herodotos of Halikarnassos, the famous historian of the Persian Wars period († c. 424 BC). Fortunately, nobody else seemed to have noticed as I acquired it at a fraction of my very high maximum bid.
Antoninus Pius AE21, 138-161 AD, Halikarnassos,
Caria.
Obv. ΑΥ ΤΙ ΑΙ ΚΑΙ ΑΝΤΩΝΕΙΝΟC,
bare head of
Antoninus Pius right.
Rev. ΗΡΟΔΟΤΟC ΑΛΙΚΑΡΝΑCCΕΩΝ, draped and bearded
bust of Herodotos right.
21 mm, 5.90 g
RPC online temp. 3148 (1 specimen)
Herodotos was shown very infrequently on imperial coins from Halikarnassos (which are
rare in general anyway), f.e. under
Trajan,
Hadrian and
Gordian III.
RPC online knows a single specimen (unpictured) from the Antonine period, in
Berlin. I attach a scan from Karl Schefold's
Bildnisse der Antiken Dichter, Redner und Denker from 1943 that shows the
Berlin coin.
Side by
side comparison with my
coin shows that it probably is the same
reverse die, although the corrosion suggest differently at first glance. The
attribution of my coin to Halikarnassos is further confirmed by
SNG Leypold 821 (
head of
Athena left), a larger module coin for Pius from the same
mint where the emperor's
portrait quite obviously seems to be from the same hand.
Epigraphic evidence shows that Halikarnassos erected a statue to its famous citizen in early hellenistic time. Due to the iconographic
consistency of Herodot's portraiture on imperial time coins,
Schefold suspects that the dies were modelled after that statue.
Lars
