Sale: CNG 66, Lot: 413. Estimate $7500.  Closing Date: Wednesday, 19 May 2004.  Sold For $8300. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

KINGS of PONTOS. Mithradates VI. 120-63 BC. AV Stater (8.26 gm). Dated year 209 (89/8 BC). Diademed head right, hair tousled and flowing freely / Stag grazing left; star and crescent to left, QS and monogram to right; all within ivy wreath. De Callataÿ pg. 4 (D5/R8 - this coin); SNG BM Black Sea 1028; SNG Lockett 2644 (same obverse die); cf. SNG Copenhagen 233. Good VF, a few light scratches in field. Rare. ($7500)

Ex Hess-Leu 45 (12-13 May 1970), lot 232.

Mithradates is the Hellenistic monarch par excellence, and his career was 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 cistophoric coinage that formerly circulated in the Asian territory he conquered in his first war with Rome in 88 BC, which witnessed the horrific massacre of the Roman citizens of Asia Minor. The stag probably represents the civic center of Ephesos and the mintmark is of Pergamon, all part of the new Pontic kingdom as symbolized by the star and crescent. His empire collapsed before the armies of Sulla and Lucullus, and Mithradates ended his own life an exile in the far region of the Crimea, pursued to the end by vengeful Romans and family.