Sale: Nomos 2, Lot: 25. Estimate CHF10000.  Closing Date: Monday, 17 May 2010.  Sold For CHF8000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

SICILY, Syracuse. Under the Deinomenids. 485-466 BC. Tetradrachm (Silver, 17.49 g 6), struck circa 480/478-475. Male charioteer, wearing a long chiton and holding a goad in his right hand and the reins in both, driving a walking quadriga to right; above Nike flying right to crown the horses. Rev. ΣVRΑΚΟΣΙΟΝ Head of Arethusa to right, wearing necklace and pearl diadem, and with her hair hanging down the back of her neck and tied at the end; around, four dolphins swimming clockwise. Boehringer - (this combination of dies not listed, though the dies are known: V 85/R 132). SNG ANS 71 var. A finely toned and attractive coin with an unusually small and delicate head of Arethusa. Minor die break on the obverse, extremely fine.

From the Patrick H. C. Tan Collection.

Boehringer’s great corpus was written in 1925 as his doctoral dissertation and was expanded in the interval before its publication in 1929: during that time he was able to see many coins that he had hitherto known only from casts. The list of people he thanks on pp. v-vi includes all the great collectors and scholars (often one and the same) of the day. The cooperation he received was exemplary. In the intervening eighty years the great worth of Boehringer’s masterwork on Syracuse has been proven again and again: his chronology has been modified, and a few new dies and die combinations have appeared, but the general structure he established for the coinage is still fully valid (among the 308 tetradrachms in the great Randazzo hoard, there were only 3 obverse and 8 reverse dies unknown to Boehringer, as well as 25 new combinations - including those with the new dies). The present example provides us with yet another new link: between obverse V 85 (hitherto only known combined with a single reverse - R 129) and reverse R 132 (hitherto known combined with V87 and V 94).