A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words. A coin of Maroneia

THRACE. Maroneia. Tetradrachm (Circa 189/8-49/5 BC). Obv: Head of Dionysus right, wearing ivy wreath. Rev: ΔIONYΣOY / ΣΩTHPOΣ / MAPΩNITΩN. Dionysus standing left, holding grape bunch and narthex stalks. Controls: monogram to inner left and inner right. Weight: 15.67 g. Diameter: 32 mm.

As part of the section I have been writing on the coins of Southern Italy I have been relying heavily on the coins from the British Museum which have a public use license (but are sparsely imaged, which is another issue). Handling copyright seems to be one of the major blockers to sharing knowledge of ancient coins for those who want to write, or publish opinion or challenge orthodoxy. To be clear, any images of coins that I publish on the Collections section of this site are of coins owned and photographed by me. The images may be used for any non-commercial purpose whatsoever without attribution. If you need a better image just let me know. Please feel free to educate the world on the joy of ancient Greek coins.

This coin, for me, illustrates what is publicly expected of Greek coins. It is large, bold and has on the obverse an image of the well-known persona, Dionisius. There are no pictures than can do justice to the patina and tactile qualities of this coin.

It is strange that in his Geographies Strabo mentions Maroneia five times but always in relation to its position to other cities, he never directly describes the city itself. But it is possible to piece together the origins in literature. Each Greek city has its founding myth and in Euripides Cyclops Maron is the son of Dionysus, whose image features so magnificently on the obverse of this coin. The city seems always to have been associated with wine as Homer mentions that Odysseus and his men landed on the coast of Thrace and received wine from Maroneia (then Ismarus) for not having plundered the temple of Apollo. The wine is described as "a distillation of ambrosia and nectar" (Od. ix. 359). In Historia Numorum Barkley Head describes the city as being named after Maron, son of Euanthes, a priest of Apollo but also notes he is called a son of Dionysius. He places the coins as belonging to the Thraco-Macedonian or Babylonic standard and rather unkindly characterizes this coin type as in the decline of Greek artistic numismatic expression.

More founded in history, the consensus seems to be that the city was founded by colonists from Chios in the 7th Century BC. The city is now a Greek village in western Thrace where you can still see the Cyclops cave, but its roots seem to go back to a pre-Thracian age before the settlement of the Chians.

Maroneia, as with all of Thrace, fell under the dominion of the Macedonian empire from the mid-4th century but gained independent coinage again in the second century when the Romans had brought Greece under its dominion and declared Maroneia a free city in 200 B.C. This coin falls into that period.

The Greek legend on the reverse translates as Dionysus, savior of Maroneia. Edith Schönert-Geiss has suggested that the monograms that you can see left and right of the Dionysius in the reverse are date marks given the wide variety known. Current research is bringing forward the start date of these coins to about 146 BC.