Featured My first Tarentum dolphin rider :)

Hey Donna,

Yes, the diobols are different from the nomoi or staters with the horsemen / dolphin rider designs. The diobols are smaller and typically had the design with Athena in a Corinthian or Attic helmet on the obverse and Hercules wrestling the Nemean lion on the reverse (although there are a number of other varieties which are also included). There is often confusion about these diobols because similar designs were issued in Herakleia, Rubi and other city-states, and the differences aren't always easy to identify. (note: these are not my coins)



The diobol coinage marked a definite shift in currency use within Magna Grecia for primarily military purposes (the nomoi were often struck to pay the mercenary troops of the series of condottiere like Pyrrhus who were asked by Taranto to help defend the city against Messapian attacks) to more commercial purposes. It was also significant in that the vast circulation of this coinage in the south and its popularity served to exclude the emerging Roman power from trade and commerce in the South (Rome later issued the victoriatius primarily for this purpose, which only really gained momentum in the South following the ejection of Hannibal).

Taranto had an interesting coinage series which was different from other Magna Grecian colonies in that it was one of the earliest mints in Magna Grecia, and issued coins primarily in gold and silver initially, with a ton of fractional denominations including litras, obols, diobols, hemiobols, and tritemorions. Only around the period of the second Punic War did it begin issuing bronzes like the other Magna Grecian city states.

The reason why a separate book on Tarentine diobols came to be was because Alberto gathered all the plate pictures of all the Tarentine coins from the different museums around the world in the course of writing the Tarentine coinage references. He realized that classifying and publishing all the diobol images separately had never been done before and could potentially have value for collectors and numismatists interested in these diobols. This reference will be great for those who want to die-link their coinage with others from museums or auctions. There are literally several hundred (if not a thousand) photographs in this reference just of the different diobols. I will be excited to see it in print.

 

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Thanks for the explanation!

 

No worries, Donna!