Greece (Thessaly, Pharkadon): silver hemidrachm; Thessalos restraining bull, ca. 440-400 BC

Greece (Thessaly, Pharkadon): silver hemidrachm; Thessalos restraining bull, ca. 440-400 BC



Obverse: The hero Thessalos, petasos around neck, restraining forepart of bull by its head.
Reverse: Forepart of horse right within incuse square, Φ-Α-Ρ-Κ-ΑΔ-Ο (partially retrograde).
Issuing authority: Pharkadon (Pharcadon) in Thessaly.
Composition, diameter, weight: Silver, 15 mm, 2.72 g.
Grade, certification: VF; some light marks near obverse rim.
Reference attribution: BCD Thessaly II 603; HGC 4, 292 (per Sphinx Numismatics).
Provenance: Ex-Sphinx Numismatics, Markham, Ontario, Canada, via VCoins store, 26 January 2018.* Prior provenance to the BCD Collection.

Notes: The ritual sport of bull-wrestling as practiced in Thessaly apparently involved riding up to the bull on horseback and then leaping off one's horse to subdue it.

This coin is pedigreed to the large and often-cited BCD collection.

 

Wikimedia Commons - public domain

Taurokathapsia. There's your fancy word for the day. Say it out loud if you dare. It is a term for ritual bull-leaping in the ancient world, and is thought to have been coined around 1910 by Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who excavated the Minoan palace at Knossos in Crete with its famous frescoes showing bull-leaping.

The 2,400 year old coin shown above is still about a thousand years later than the Knossos frescoes. It shows a man (variously described as a "youth" or "bull wrestler" or as the hero Thessalos) subduing a bull by grabbing it by the horns and passing a band of leather or cloth over its eyes. Whether the bull-wrestling hero would then jump over the bull like the ancient Minoan youths did is unknown, but the ritual sport as practiced in Thessaly apparently involved riding up to the bull on horseback and then leaping off one's horse to subdue it. So it was quite the manly feat. I suppose that as long as there have been bulls and men in close proximity, there has been bull-leaping, bullfighting, and rodeos.

I just liked the look of the coin above, though the ancient Greek designs showing the forepart of a bisected animal body always appealed to me a little less than the ones showing the whole beastie. (The artisans who engraved the dies were doing the best they could with available space.) Artistic conventions aside, the design was intriguing, and I liked the toning. The pedigree didn't hurt, either.

Pros:

• This is a considerably ancient silver coin with over 24 centuries of history.
• It has an interesting, unusual, and somewhat mysterious design. The motif itself is clear enough, but what exactly it was intended to portray is what's intriguing. Compared with some of the coins showing heroes wrestling lions and such, it seems almost peaceful. Thessalos seems to be sedately leading the bull along, not the least bit winded from chasing it down and subduing it. (Maybe that was easy for someone with such hilariously overdeveloped thighs!) It has a somewhat whimsical look, which is fun.
• The coin exhibits attractive grey toning and has in my opinion good eye appeal overall (or I wouldn't have bought it). On any kind of circulated silver coin, I prefer this appearance to that of a coin that is all white. All ancient silver has been cleaned after being unearthed, but the pieces which subsequently developed "cabinet toning" in old collections are the most appealing to my eyes.
• This is pedigreed to the BCD collection, which is not a rare pedigree (BCD had an enormous collection), but a recognized, important, and well-published one, cited by many references on Greek coins.
• At a cost of slightly over $100 USD, this was a (reasonably) affordable coin as ancient Greek silver goes.

Cons:

• There are some faint old scratches in the unstruck metal along one portion of the obverse edge. These are noticeable but not necessarily distracting.
• The grade is relatively modest as the coin did receive some noticeable wear in ancient times, but everything's "all there", and while not a high grade piece, it's not especially low-end, either. It's a middle-of-the-road example, gradewise.
• There is some doubling in the reverse strike, giving the horse's face a somewhat strange appearance. Doubling seems to be less appealing to collectors of ancient coins than it is to enthusiasts of modern error coins, but it's really more of a neutral consideration than a negative one. Some might even like it.
• This is a hemidrachm (half-drachm), so a somewhat smaller denomination, though at 15 mm in diameter (just barely smaller than a United States dime) it could better be described as "small" rather than "tiny". People tend to prefer the bigger denominations like tetradrachms, but that's why those are so expensive. These smaller coins offer a much more affordable opportunity to collect ancient Greek silver, and the artistry on some of the small denominations can still be breathtaking (though it's more average in this particular case).

Feel free to post your similar coins if you like.

 

Mea culpa - shamelessly bumping this back into the sunlight just this once, since it didn't get seem to get seen much, and I had just come back here to consult my notes on it.

 

Thanks for posting those. The variations are interesting.

 

I voted 8 myself.

 

Ooh! Full critters AND sweet toning! ❤

 

Thanks for the breakdown!

I've decided to include a balanced-as-possible "pros & cons" section in my upcoming writeups. Obviously there is positive bias when we are discussing a coin I liked enough to buy. But the "pros & cons" are an attempt to "zoom out" a little and try for a more objective viewpoint.

I fully confess to ripping off the idea of the "pros & cons" format from the Antique Sage blog's "spotlight" articles.

As to the polls, well ... It's not necessarily a given that I'll automatically vote "10" on all my own coins. This one got an 8 from me, for example. Most get a 9. I reserve 10 for my top favorites.

 

BTW, @Alegandron - I quite like that Thessalian League double victoriatus of yours. I owned one for a little while, perhaps 12 years ago, even before I really got serious about ancients. It wasn't as nicely toned as yours, though.

I need to get another one of those one day. Like the coin in the OP, they're relatively affordable as Greek silver goes, and the pairing of stern Zeus with spear-throwing Athena is rather irresistible.

And the Larissa horsies are lovely, but I figure the Helios portrait on my Macedonian "Mercenaries" drachm is similar enough for now.

 

It's just an open-ended, never-ending, semi-meaningless poll.