Sale: Triton IX, Lot: 81. Estimate $20000.  Closing Date: Monday, 9 January 2006.  Sold For $26000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

BOIOTIA, Federal Coinage. Circa 287 BC. AR Tetradrachm (16.86 g, 11h). Attic standard. Laureate head of Poseidon right, wearing hair long at neck / Poseidon, holding dolphin in his right hand and trident in his left, seated left on throne with lion's legs at the front and decorated on its side with a Boiotian shield; behind, BOIWTWN downward. Head, Boeotia p. 83; Gulbenkian 920 = Jameson 2065 = Weber 3303 (same dies); De Luynes 1980. Good VF, even pearl grey cabinet tone, small area of flat strike on reverse. Extremely rare, a coin of paramount importance for any serious collector of Greek coins. ($20,000)

Ex John Work Garrett Collection (Leu and Numismatic Fine Arts 16 October 1984), lot 212 (CHF 62,000 hammer); Clarence S. Bement Collection (Naville-Ars Classica VI, 28 January 1924), lot 1053; A. Rhousopoulos Collection (J. Hirsch XIII, 15 May 1905), lot 1688.

Just two examples of this type have been sold publicly since the Maxime Collignon Collection coin sold by Feuardent on 17 December 1919 (= Sotheby's Late Collector sale [28 May 1900], lot 277 = Sotheby's Carfrae sale [23 May 1894], lot 159). CNG sold the only other specimen to appear at auction since Garrett commissioned Leonard Forrer to buy this coin for him out of the Bement sale in 1923. The CNG specimen sold in Triton VIII, 11 January 2005, lot 298 for $42,500 hammer.

For the dating see Newell pp. 126-128 and pl. XV, 7 illustrating a coin of the ANS. Jenkins argues in Gulbenkian II, p. 123, that the obverse head is that of Poseidon. It is not unheard of to have the same deity on both sides of a coin and Demetrius Poliorcetes would certainly approve of the double depiction of his patron god. It also appears that the obverse die of this coin was engraved by another artist and not by the celator who produced its reverse die with the seated Poseidon, the head of whom is a replica of the head of the standing god engraved by the same artist on the contemporary tetradrachms of the Macedonian king.