Sale: Triton VIII, Lot: 70. Estimate $30000.  Closing Date: Monday, 10 January 2005.  Sold For $35000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

SICILY, Naxos. Circa 460 BC. AR Tetradrachm (16.42 gm. 6h). Bearded head of Dionysos right, wearing wreath of ivy, hair tied in bunch behind head / N-AXI-ON, nude and ithyphallic Silenos squatting facing, head left, holding kantharos in right hand, leaning on left. Cahn 54 (V39/R45); SNG ANS 515; SNG Lloyd 1150; SNG Lockett 840; Gulbenkian 230-231; Rizzo pl. 28, 2; Jenkins 673; SNG Fitzwilliam 1108; Kraay & Hirmer 6 (all references same dies). Good VF, nicely toned, some light porosity and corrosion, small spot of horn silver below Selinos slightly smoothed. Struck from an earlier die state with no trace of the die break under the nose. One of the most celebrated coins from antiquity, a masterpiece of engraving. ($30,000)

From the Ronald Cohen Collection. Ex Gorny & Mosch 112 (17 October 2001), lot 4028; Nelson Bunker Hunt Collection IV (Sotheby's, 19-20 June 1991), lot 79.

Although never a place of political importance, the city of Naxos was the earliest of the Greek colonies in Sicily, having been founded from Chalkis about 735 BC by a contingent of settlers many of whom we may assume had originated from the Aegean island of that name. Moreover, Naxos was the mother-city of two more celebrated Sicilian communities, those of Leontini and Katana. In 476 BC, the population of Naxos was removed to Leontini by Hieron of Syracuse. They returned home fifteen years later in 461 BC, and this tetradrachm may have been struck to celebrate that event. The issue is struck from only one pair of dies, probably from the same hand as the unique Aetna tetradrachm in the Brussels cabinet. Nearly 75 examples are traceable today.