Nomos 12

KINGS of PONTOS. Pharnakes I, circa 200/185-169 BC. Drachm (Silver, 17mm, 4.17 g 12). Diademed head of Pharnakes to right, with short beard and mustache. Rev. ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ / ΦΑΡΝΑΚΟΥ Uncertain male figure standing facing: he wears a floppy petasos and drapery reaching down to his knees; above his head, horizontal thunderbolt; he holds a kerykeion and a cornucopiae with his left hand and, with his right, a vine branch from which a deer feeds, standing right at his feet; in inner field to left, star within crescent. De Callataÿ O1/R1 (same dies) = SNG von Aulock 3. Very rare. An attractive coin, with a superb portrait, well struck and well centered on a broad flan. Slightly rough surfaces, otherwise, about extremely fine.

From a European private collection.

Pharnakes I, the son of the Pontic king Mithridates III, spent much of his reign attempting to expand his kingdom, sometimes successfully. He was honored for his gifts to Athens, was married to the Seleukid princess Nysa, and seems to have had both aristocratic Persian and Macedonian ancestors. In modern times his greatest fame surely comes from the extraordinarily realistic portraits that appear on his coins: they show a veristic quality closely akin to the “warts-and-all” tradition of Roman Republican portraits rather than to the ennobling realism found in the finest purely Greek coin portraits of the Hellenistic age. No attempt was made to soften the king’s ‘brutal’ features: in fact, until the reign of Mithridates VI Pontic coinage bore the most realistic portraits ever to appear on the coinage of the Greek world.