Obolos 4

KINGS of PONTOS. Pharnakes I, circa 200/185-169 BC. Drachm (Silver, 16mm, 3.98 g 12). Diademed head of Pharnakes to right, with short beard and mustache and with his diadem end falling over his neck. Rev. ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ / ΦΑΡΝΑΚΟΥ Uncertain male figure standing facing: he wears a floppy petasos and drapery reaching down to his knees; 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; in field to right, monogram of either ΑΤ or ΑΥ. Very rare and with a superb portrait. Struck on a short flan and with rough surfaces, otherwise, good very fine.

From a European collection, formed before 2005.

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.