Obolos 30

CILICIA. Aegeae. Caligula, 37-41. Tetrassarion (Bronze, 27 mm, 11.14 g, 12 h), under the magistrate Mi... , dated ΖΠ = 87 = 40/41. Diademed and draped bust of Alexander the Great to right. Rev. AIΓAIΩN THΣ IEΡAΣ KAI AΥTONOMOΥ / ZΠ / MI Bare head of Julius Caesar to right. RPC 4036. SNG Levante 1691. Very Rare. Attractively centered and with charming portraits of Alexander and Julius Caesar. Very fine.

The Cilician city of Aegeae (Greek: city of goats) was apparently of Macedonian foundation. A fictitious letter of Alexander to his mother from (The Alexander Romance, 23) composed in the third century AD attributes the city's origin to Alexander having beaten the Persians at Issos by means of fastening torches to the horns of goats so that by night his forces seemed greater than they were, and having thus won, founded a city on that spot. In any case, cities in Cilicia were the first to depict Alexander on their civic coins, often claiming to have been founded by the great conqueror whether or not there was any truth to the matter. Certainly in Aegeae's case, the legend stuck – the city portrayed Alexander on its coinage for a period of nearly 300 years, its name recalling the capital of the Kingdom of Macedonia, and from the time of Caracalla onwards it bore the title of 'Makedonike' and in AD 228/9, 'Alexandroupolis'. The city appears to have lost its autonomy in the mid first century BC, probably at the hands of Pompey during the civil war, since as Kent J. Rigsby (Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World, 1997) notes: "it is after Caesar that Aegeae is seen to enjoy both a new era and the right to strike silver". That he should be depicted on the city's coinage as a second founder is telling, and must argue against his having been the cause of the city's loss of its old right (Hansjörg Bloesch, Hellenistic Coins of Aegeae in ANSMN 27, 1982). This refoundation must be assumed to have taken place in 47 BC, when Caesar reorganised the province.

Interestingly, several decades later Plutarch decided to pair Alexander with Julius Caesar in his famous parallel lives.