Sale: Triton IX, Lot: 397. Estimate $500.  Closing Date: Monday, 9 January 2006.  Sold For $625. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

BOIOTIA, Thebes. Circa 425-400 BC. AR Stater (12.30 g). Boiotian shield / Amphora; grape bunch on vine to left, Q-E across lower field; all within circular incuse. Head, Boeotia p. 40; Myron Hoard pl. G, 15 (same rev. die). VF, pearl grey tone with gold iridescence around the devices on reverse, graffito on reverse (PTO above, I I V to right). Overstruck on an Elis-Olympia stater with eagle flying left on the obverse (see lot 441 below for an overstrike on a similar undertype). ($500)

Ex Distos Hoard (CH VII, 38).

It is now thought that the burial date of this hoard is earlier than the "Mid. 4th cent. B.C." date suggested in the above Coin Hoards entry and this agrees with the fact that there are no magistrate staters in it. Although it is always dangerous to judge ex absentio, one would think that by the middle of the 4th century the diffusion of magistrate staters would be such that they would be found in such a hoard. See H.B. Mattingly's review of I. Carradice and M. Price, Coinage in the Greek World (NumChron 1989, pp. 230-1), for the latest opinion on the burial date of IGCH 42 which, from the slightly less fresh condition of its Euboian staters, must have been buried a few years later than Distos.