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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cmezner, post: 4993304, member: 87809&quot;]Also we can read this interesting paragraph in the 1993 publication of The American School of Classical Studies at Athens by John Kroll:</p><p><br /></p><p>Were it not for Aristophanes&#039; references to the emergency bronze of 406/5, one would not hesitate to condemn all subaerate Athenian owls as ancient counterfeits. But in a well-known passage in the Frogs (lines 725-726) Aristophanes laments that in 405 the city was using a very recently struck bronze currency in place of its fine old silver and &quot;new&quot; (i.e., 407/6) gold. In the Ekklesiazousai (lines 815-822) he recalls the awkward consequences when the bronze was demonetized in favor of the reestablished silver coinage. Since no wholly bronze coins of appropriate 5th-century date are known from Athens, numismatists have generally assumed that the 406/5 bronze was a silver-plated bronze coinage. This solution, first proposed by Barclay Head in 1911, was immeasurably strengthened some years later when Svoronos reported on a hoard discovered in 1902 in the Piraeus, which contained &quot;thousands&quot; of subaerate tetradrachms and drachms in a style (notably with the opened inner corner of Athena&#039;s eye) identical to the style of the 407/6 gold. The very magnitude of this particular plated coinage argues against its being a forger&#039;s stock: the mere hundred or so drachms that can be traced back to the Piraeus hoard show that they were minted from a minimum of five pairs of dies and that these pairs were employed in tandem, since there is no obverse or reverse sharing between them. Two tetradrachms from the hoard document a sixth pair of dies. </p><p><br /></p><p>Just&nbsp; fascinating<img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie50" alt=":happy:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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