Mithradates VI - the Epitome of a Hellenistic Monarch

Triton XIX, Lot: 143. Estimate $5000. Sold for $4250. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

KINGS of PONTOS. Mithradates VI Eupator. Circa 120-63 BC. AR Tetradrachm (31mm, 16.83 g, 11h). Pergamon mint. Dated 209 BE (89/8 BC). Diademed head right / BAΣIΛEΩΣ MIΘPAΔATOY EYΠATOPOΣ, Pegasos grazing left; star-in-crescent to left; to right, ΘΣ (date) above monogram; all within Dionysiac wreath of ivy and fruit. Callataÿ p. 13, dies D53/R10; HGC 7, 338; DCA 688; SNG von Aulock 7; SNG BM Black Sea 1034–5 (same obv. die); SNG Copenhagen –; Dewing 2121 = Jameson 1366 (same obv. die); Pozzi 2095 (same dies). EF, lightly toned, slightly double struck. Struck in high relief.

From the Friend of a Scholar Collection, purchased from Platt, September 1980.

Mithradates is the Hellenistic monarch par excellence, his career driven by megalomaniacal ambitions leading to murderous assaults upon family and followers and disastrous foreign adventures against superior forces. His idealized portraiture attempts to mimic the gods with its bold staring gaze and unruly, free-flowing hair, but at its most extreme is a personification of hysteria in its Dionysiac sense. The wreath of ivy on the reverse reinforces Mithradates' link with the god as well as making a connection with the cistaphoric coinage that circulated in the area. The stag probably represents the civic center of Ephesos and the mintmark is of Pergamon, all part of the new Pontic kingdom, symbolized by the star and crescent. His empire collapsed before the armies of Sulla and Lucullus, and Mithradates ended his own life in exile in the far region of the Crimea, pursued to the end by vengeful Romans and family.