From the Winokur and Garrett Collections

Sale: Triton X, Lot: 278. Estimate $10000.  Closing Date: Monday, 8 January 2007.  Sold For $11000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

ISLANDS off TROAS, Tenedos. Circa 100-70 BC. AR Tetradrachm (16.65 g, 1h). Janiform head of a laureate male and diademed female / TENEDIWN, labrys; monogram and grape bunch to left, caps of the Dioskouroi to right; all within laurel wreath. Callataÿ, Tenedos 91 (D6/R2 - this coin); SNG Copenhagen -; BMC 29; Gulbenkian 974 = Pozzi 2289; De Luynes 2519 (same obv. die); Hirsch 1471. EF, attractive dark gray toning with iridescent hues around the devices. A wonderful, well pedigreed example.

From the Richard Winokur Collection. Ex Lanz 34 (25 November 1985), lot 254; John W. Garrett Collection (Part II, Numismatic Fine Arts & Leu, 16 October 1984), lot 259; purchased from W. Raymond, 1 October 1923.

This principal coin type from the island of Tenedos with the janiform head/labrys is among the most enigmatic of all Greek coinage and has elicited a variety of explanations from ancient observers and modern scholars. According to Stephanus Byzantinus, Aristotle considered the reverse type to be a representation of a local tradition in which an ancient king of Tenedos punished adulterers, one of whom was his own son, by beheading them (s.v. Tenedos in K.W. Dindorf, Stephanus Byzantinus cum annotationibus, Leipzig, 1825, I, pp. 410-11). Another possibility is that the labrys represents a form of barter-currency that predated coinage at Tenedos. A possible Minoan connection noted by some scholars would seem to lend credibility to this suggestion. Most, however, have come to associate this civic badge with the worship of Dionysos, as the labrys is accompanied by grapes; in some cases it is set upon an altar basis, accompanied by two sacred pillars, or is linked to an amphora by a fillet. The wreath enclosing the labrys is readily explained as the defining feature of the stephanephoric (‘wreath-bearing’) coinages of the Hellenistic age.

The janiform head on the obverse is equally enigmatic. Though the possible religious context of the labrys as an instrument for the worship of Dionysos makes it tempting to consider the janiform head a composite of young and old/masculine and effeminate aspects of Dionysos, this must be ruled out because the heads are not wreathed in ivy. More likely, it is a representation of Zeus and Hera, the principals of the Greek pantheon, as the male head is wreathed in laurel leaves, and the female head wears a stephane.