Sale: Triton VI, Lot: 314. Estimate $12500.  Closing Date: Monday, 13 January 2003.  Sold For $12000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

MYSIA, Lampsakos. Circa 370 BC. AV Stater (8.35 gm). Persic standard. Half length figure of Demeter, wearing girdled chiton and himation, rising left from earth, holding three ears of grain; behind left shoulder, two ears of grain and vine bearing two bunches of grapes / Forepart of winged horse right with curved wing. Baldwin, Lampsakos I 25b = Weber 5096 (this coin); Traité pl. CLXX, 32 = BMC Mysia pg. 81, 26 (same obverse die). Good VF. Extremely rare, only two known specimens, this being the only one in private hands. (See color enlargement on plate 1.) ($12,500) 

Ex Charles Gillet Collection; Sir Herman Weber Collection, 5096.

Lampsakos was a city that depended upon the traffic passing between the Aegean and the Black Sea, and possessed an excellent harbour in a strategic position guarding the eastern entrance to the Hellespont opposite Callipolis. The city was known to have existed under the name of Pityusa before it received colonists from the Ionian cities of Phocaea and Miletus (Strabo xiii, p. 589). In the sixth and fifth centuries Lampsakos passed successively under Lydian, Persian, Athenian, and Spartan control. Its tribute of twelve talents, as a member of the Delian League, and production of electrum staters in the fifth century, attest to its commercial wealth. Following the example and standard of the Persic daric, Lampsakos was the first Greek city to make regular issues of gold coinage which enjoyed an international circulation from Sicily to the Black Sea. As at Kyzikos, the quality of engraving was very high, and types changed frequently: about forty types were produced in a period of about sixty years, one of the most interesting of which is the highly original rendering of Demeter Chthonia rising from the ground (not Gaia, the personification of cosmic Earth, as previously identified, pace Agnes Baldwin). Chthonic deities were those whose powers came from the earth. An important aspect of Demeter celebrated in the Eleusinian Mysteries was that she was venerated as an earth-goddess who symbolised the annual cycle of death and rebirth in nature, especially the grain harvest. Dionysus was also venerated in the mysteries, and is referred to by the bunches grapes behind Demeter.