CNG 100, Lot: 9. Estimate $1500. Sold for $1700. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

SICILY, Panormos. temp. Pyrrhos of Epeiros. Circa 276 BC. AV Twenty-fourth Stater – Hemiobol (6.5mm, 0.34 g, 3h). Laureate head of Apollo right / Kithara; ΠA monogram to right. HGC 2, 1064 (this coin illustrated); SNG ANS 577; BMC 7. VF. Very rare.

From the collection of Dr. Lawrence A. Adams. Ex Lawrence R. Stack Collection (Stack’s, 14 January 2008), lot 2096; James A. Ferrendelli Collection (Triton VII, 13 January 2004), lot 76; Classical Numismatic Group 40 (4 December 1996), lot 817.

This small gold hemiobol, and its companion tritetartemorion (see previous lot), struck on the Attic standard, probably constituted a donative issue struck after the capture of Panormos by Pyrrhos of Epeiros in 276 BC.

The attribution of these two coins to Panormos is not without controversy. As early as B. Head’s second edition of Historia Nummorum, these were tentatively given to Tauromenion, due to the use of this monogram on other gold of that city. A. Campana, in his series of articles on the mints of Magna Graecia, agreed with this attribution, and assigned them to the period of circa 214-212 BC. K. Rutter, however, in cataloging the Dewing collection’s coins of Calabria, placed the Athena/Owl type at Tarentum, suggesting that the types were appropriate for that mint’s issues during the time of Pyrrhos. Most recently, J. Morcom (in Essays Russo), agreed with Rutter’s reassignment, and adds that not only are the coins typologically congruous with the Pyrrhic issues, but also metrologically, as sixteenth and twenty-fourth staters, respectively.