Rarest Issue of Naxos
Survivors of the Destruction

445, Lot: 43. Estimate $250. Sold for $1100. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

SICILY, Naxos. After 403 BC. AR Dilitron (10mm, 1.06 g, 10h). Laureate head of Apollo right; ivy leaf and berry behind neck / Silenos, nude and bearded, tail behind, squatting half-left, holding up [kantharos] in right hand and resting his left hand on base of thyrsos to right, from which a large ivy vine with grape bunches springs forth to left; NEO-ΠO-ΛI around lower right edge. Cahn 149 (V91/R120); Campana 38; HGC 2, 1570 (Tauromenion). Good Fine, oblong flan. Extremely rare, apparently the third known, and the only piece not in a public collection (both of the others are in Berlin).

From the Colin E. Pitchfork Collection. Ex Numismatic Circular C.8 (October 1992), no. 5846.

The attribution of this issue to Naxos has been debated for some time (the first Berlin coin was accessioned in 1846). While the reverse type is doubtless of Naxian origin, the legend led A. von Sallet, who first published the coin in the 1874 issue of ZfN, to attribute the coin to a city called Neapolis in Sicily, for which there is no evidence today. Later, A. Holm, in his book Geschichte Siziliens im Alterum, Bd. III (1898), suggested that the coins represented an issue from the survivors of Naxos’ destruction in 403 BC who were settled in Mylai by the Rhegians in 394 BC. However, no evidence exists that these survivors struck coins in Mylai, and the legend also seems improbable; Mylai was not a new city, and the Naxians were not given control of the polis when they were settled there (in fact, they were only part of the resettlement by the Rhegians, who also moved the survivors of Katane’s destruction there). Most recently, the issue was discussed by A. Campana, who noted that there is archaeological evidence that after the destruction of Naxos in 403, the northernmost part of the city continued to be inhabited, and it is probably an issue of this remaining population (see also ACIP p. 219 noting evidence of a populace as late as the 3rd century). The uncertainty of the prior attributions is certainly based on too literal a reading of the ancient literature attesting to the destruction of the city (a similar situation is recognized regarding Alexander the Great’s destruction of the city of Tyre). This “destruction” was not absolute; the city center was razed, but some portion of the population remained on site. In fact, the legend, attesting to a “new city”, affirms the notion that Naxos had been officially destroyed, thus requiring the issue omit the old ethnic, lest the Syracusans take notice that they had not completed their mission.