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Message:: [QUOTE="John Anthony, post: 8197734, member: 42773"]Recently Sulla80 contacted me and told me he had acquired a Paeonian tetradrachm of Patraos. It turns out that I was in the process of preparing a post that examined the historiography of the Ariston/Satropates interpretation, so we decided to collaborate. My interest in these coins stems from the fact that several years ago I had sold one of them to a fellow forum member, [USER=77077]@Theodosius[/USER], and recently acquired a Celtic imitation for my collection. Here they are side-by-side… [ATTACH=full]1436037[/ATTACH] KINGS OF PAEONIA. Patraos, 335-315 BC.AR Tetradrachm, 25mm, 12.83 grams, 6h.Obv.: Laureate head of Apollo right.Rev.: ΠATPAY; Horseman holding spear and trampling warrior holding Macedonian shield, wearing kausia and chiton.Ref.: Sotheby’s Paeonian Hoard 461 (same dies); SNG ANS 1040 var.Ex-Fred Shore. CELTS IN EASTERN EUROPE.Imitating Patraos of Paeonia.AR Tetradrachm, 25mm, 12g, 6h; after 335 BC.Obv.: Celticized head of Apollo right.Rev.: ΠATPAY; Horseman holding spear and trampling warrior holding Macedonian shield, wearing kausia and chiton.Ref.: Sotheby’s Paeonian Hoard 508.Dr. Busso Peus Nachfolger, <a href="https://peus-muenzen.auex.de/img/lose/kataloge/425/mobile/index.html#p=34" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://peus-muenzen.auex.de/img/lose/kataloge/425/mobile/index.html#p=34" rel="nofollow">Auction 425 Lot 174</a>, 2019. From the H. S. Collection. ex-M&M Basel, List 407, 17, 1979. Sulla asked me if I had a copy of Sotheby and Co.’s Catalogue of the Paeonian Hoard, the record of a sale on 16 April 1969, and the only important reference for Paeonian coinage. During my research, I had purchased a copy of the catalog on eBay, and when it arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find a letter in in from B. Curtis of D. J. Crowther, one of the preparers of the sale, to none other than Irwin Merker. (The eBay seller had in fact included an image of the letter in the listing, but I hadn’t bothered to look at all the images, hence the surprise!) From the letter we can gather that Merker had not seen the coins of the Paeonian Hoard before he published The Ancient Kingdom of Paeonia, and indeed the catalog is not listed in his bibliography. [ATTACH=full]1436038[/ATTACH] Merker never returned to the study of Paeonian history after his one-and-only treatise, but if he had examined the coins found in the Sotheby’s catalog, he surely would have revised Gaebler’s theory. As Mr. Sulla mentioned in the first post, that revision came 50 years later from Nicholas Wright. It’s curious to note that the authors of the Sotheby’s catalog had foreshadowed the reinterpretation of the horseman and warrior: “The significance of the headdress and weapons of the fallen foot soldier – the Macedonian causia, or crested helmet and the Macedonian shield – has not been fully explained, though the meaning would appear to be implicit.” [Catalog of the Paeonian Hoard, Sotheby and Co., 1969, p. 10.] Did Merker examine any of the coins himself? He does not refer to any specific examples or collections in the body of his paper, nor are any listed in the bibliography, and the single image of a Patraos tetradrachm in the article is small and blurry. Apparently Merker simply imported Gaebler’s ideas into his paper wholesale. Can we fault him for that? Perhaps not. Prior to the discovery of the Paeonian Hoard, the tetradrachms of Patraos were quite rare. Merker may have had no opportunity to inspect one personally, and if he had had better images to work with, I assume he would have included one in the paper. Furthermore, there was no reason not to trust an esteemed scholar such as Hugo Gaebler. I won’t recapitulate Wright’s arguments, as Sulla has done a thorough job of summarizing them in the first post, so I’ll move on to the discussion of the Celtic imitations. The Celts Archaeological evidence of the Celts begins with the Hallstatt culture of the 6th and 7th centuries BC, which ranged from southern France across Switzerland and into south-western Germany. Social, economic, and religious changes in the 5th century compelled the tribes to disperse. They migrated both eastward and westward, eventually encompassing an area from the Danube River Valley to the tip of the Iberian Peninsula.           By the middle of the 4th century BC, the Celtic advance had pushed the Triballi (a Thracian tribe) into Macedonia. Alexander III, crowned in 335, pursued and defeated the Triballi, and the Celts, perhaps wishing not to incur a similar fate, sent a delegation to the young king that swore an oath of allegiance to him. [ATTACH=full]1436039[/ATTACH] Expansion of the Celtic tribes into Thrace according to Francisco Villar, added to Nicholas Wright’s map by John Anthony. Earlier, Paeonia had had its share of conflict with Macedonia, but that conflict had been temporarily resolved by Phillip II with a combination of force, diplomacy, and bribery. When a Paeonian regiment was assembled to march with Alexander on Darius III, Celtic mercenaries were a part of the company. Daphne Nash informs us that the earliest Celtic coinage must be interpreted in this military context. “Although Celtic mercenaries are recorded as having served for Dionysius I of Syracuse at the beginning of the fourth century, they were first employed on a truly mass scale in the eastern Mediterranean, by Philip II of Macedon (359-336 BC) and then by Alexander the Great (336-323 BC) and his successors. Philip’s coinage furnished prototypes for the earliest native issues both in the Danube basin and in the upper Rhineland, suggesting his soldiers were recruited from both areas.” [Nash, Daphne. Coinage in the Celtic World. B. A. Seaby Ltd., London. 1987, pp. 16-17.] In addition to the coinage of Philip II and Alexander III, the Eastern Celts also imitated the tetradrachms of Patraos. Excepting a few light-weight outliers, both the tetradrachms of Patraos and their Celtic imitations were struck on what the Sotheby’s catalog refers to as a “debased graeco-asiatic standard” – drachms weighing around 3 grams, tetradrachms between 12 and 13. While Celtic tribes struck coins imitating the tetradrachms of Philip II throughout the continent, these imitations appear to be a local phenomenon. For instance, in de Jersey’s exhaustive list of hoard and individual finds of Armorica [Philip de Jersey. Coinage in Iron Age Armorica. Oxford University Press. 1994] there isn’t a single instance of the Paeonian imitations. The Celtic imitations are also very rare. Of the hundreds of coins of Patraos discovered in the Paeonian Hoard, only 18 were Celtic. I found about thirty examples online. Those thirty coins share very few die linkages, which suggests that many more were produced than have survived or been discovered. Here is a representative sample… [ATTACH=full]1436040[/ATTACH] On my specimen, the warrior is clearly outfitted with a Macedonian shield, kausia, and chiton, although he is also wearing trousers or some sort of leggings. So, the Eastern Celts were willing to imitate coin types that celebrated Patraos’ independence from Macedonia. That, in addition to the fact that the imitative coins were mostly struck on the same standard, strongly suggests that they were used specifically for trade with Paeonia. Resources As Mr. Sulla has already posted a bibliography, I’ll give a brief book review… I slogged my way through Bernhard Maier’s factually dense magnum opus, The Celts. Covering 2400 years of history in 253 pages doesn’t leave much room for elaboration, but the book is an extremely valuable reference that offers a broad overview, and points to hundreds of additional sources for further study. There is, however, very little discussion of coinage. Daphne Nash’s Coinage in the Celtic World is an essential primer on the subject, covering the earliest imitative issues of the 4th century BC to the later issues of the various tribes of Gaul and Britain, with an important discussion of the role of coinage in Celtic society. However, there is no mention of the Paeonian imitations, which is odd, as they constitute a rare but significant departure from the coinage modeled after Macedonian types, and Nash was writing 18 years after the publication of The Paeonian Hoard. Sotheby and Co.’s Catalogue of the Paeonian Hoard is the only substantial reference for Paeonian coins, far more comprehensive than SNG ANS. The hoard included a small number of staters and tetradrachms of Philip II, a handful of staters of Alexander III, and a few tetradrachms of Paeonian king Lykkeios. The bulk of the coins were the tetradrachms of Patraos (several hundred), and 18 Celtic imitations (of only the Patraos type). This is the only reference that allows a detailed study of die varieties, although very few of the coins were photographed (9 plates), presumably because of the expense of imaging and printing in 1969. [ATTACH=full]1436041[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]

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