Vente aux enchères du 22 janvier 2022 à Genève

Agnes Baldwin Brett in 1924 identified some 41 distinct stater issues over a period of no more than sixty years in the fourth century BC (the metal needed for these emissions probably came from the northern Black Sea lands), which shows there was strong economic activity in Lampsakos, until the arrival of Alexander the Great, thanks to its strategic position as a harbor on the eastern entrance to the Hellespont: its prosperity can be deduced from the heavy phoros (tribute) of twelve talents which it had to pay in the mid-fifth century BC as a member of the Delian League. The city had been under Persian control from 498/497 BC, when a son-in-low of Darios I had conquered the city after a revolt of Ionian cities, until the 450s BC when it had joined the Delian League after the death of its ruler the exiled Athenian general Themistokles (who had been given the gover- norship of the Magnesian district by Artaxerxes). The fact that these gold issues were struck on the Persian weight-standard is certainly significant, all-the-more that it was the Persian navy that had defeated the Spartan fleet at Knidos in 394 BC, therefore becoming the protector of the Aegean Greeks. Typically for Asia Minor, he reverses of the gold coins struck in Lampsakos during the Archaic and Classical periods always display the protome of a winged horse, perhaps Pegasus, which saved them from the need of a legend to identify the emitter.