I owe you

 

My dad has always collected something. When I was a child it was antique pistols -- my favourite was the blued Colt .45, but there was also a matchlock, a blunderbuss, a lady's Derringer, and a Belgian pinfire that looked like it was more likely to blow up in the user's hands than shoot anyone else. Later he moved on to Japanese sword guards (tsuba), then Byzantine mirrors, Hindu and Buddhist statuettes, Sami knives ..   and now, in his mid-eighties, it's ancient coins. 

This coin is from the Greek colony Mesembria, on the coast of Thrace, c. 4th century BCE. On the front, an impressive looking helmeted Herakles. This type of helmet is sometimes called Corinthian. Strabo (c. 64 BCE - 24 CE) says the original colonists came from Megara, near Corinth.

On the rear, a wheel apparently spelling META. But actually the third letter is not a T or tau but the archaic Greek letter sampi, a precursor of sigma. So the wheel is spelling out the first part of the colony's name: ME'T'AMBΡIANΩN = MEΣAMBΡIANΩN.)

Today Mesembria is the Bulgarian coastal resort Nesebar (previously Mesemvriya), about forty miles south of Varna. 

Wikipedia quotes two ancient writers as claiming that the name "Mesembria" was originally something else:  "Menebria" according to Strabo, or "Melsembria" according to Stephanus of Byzantium (fl. 6th century CE). Thus the original name was a combination of the Greek founder's name (Menas, Melsas...) with -bria, which, they assert, was the Thracian word for town. Both etymologies sound fairly dubious. 

Maybe the idea is that this "original" town name (whichever it was) then became assimilated to the more familiar-sounding word "mesembria" (modern Greek μεσημβρία (mesimvría)), which means "noon" -- as in Mesembryanthemum, the "noon-flowering" genus of ice plants from southern Africa.

From Bithynia in Greece, c. 185 BCE. On the front, the head of young Dionysus. On the rear, the centaur Cheiron, carrying a lyre.

From Megaris, a city state on the narrow isthmus of Corinth above the Peloponnese with sea access to both the west and the east. (I seem to recall that this area features heavily in Thucydides' history.) 

The city itself is Megara, perhaps the birthplace of Theognis (fl. 6th century BCE). In The Laws Plato says that Theognis came from the other Megara, in Sicily, but this statement was assailed in ancient times and there are some lines that seem to fit better with the Attic Megara, e.g. the reference to the legendary hero Alcathous (774) and the possible allusion to Theagenes, the Megarian tyrant, in 39-52.

(How much of Theognis' poetry is really by Theognis is also a matter of dispute. In a fascinating and wide-ranging review (from 1985) Gregory Nagy has suggested that Theognis was an essentially mythical personage to whom the corpus of Megarian gnomic wisdom came to be attributed.)

Anyway, for the sake of this post here is Theognis in full flow, as usual addressing his young friend Cyrnus son of Polypaus: 

The loss of counterfeit gold or silver, Cyrnus, is easily endured, nor hard is it for a man of skill to find them out; but if the mind of a friend be false within him unbeknown, and the heart in his breast deceitful, this hath God made most counterfeit for mankind, this is most grievous hard of all things to discover; for mind of man nor yet of woman shalt thou know till thou hast made trial of it like a beast of burden, nor shalt thou ever guess it as when thou comest to buy, because outward shapes do so often cheat the understanding.

(Theognis 119-128, trans. J.M. Edmonds)

Theognis is much concerned with the infection and corruption of society. His is an aristocratic viewpoint*, deprecating relations with commoners and slaves and deeply fearful of the unpredictable elements that may reside within other people, women in particular. 

[* Nagy suggests that Theognis' nobles (agathoi) are the community of the good and the principled, rather than an aristocratic class defined by birth.]

The coin is from c. 307 BCE. On the front, a galley with a trident on deck. It signifies a prayer to Poseidon for calm seas, as figured by the pair of sporting dolphins on the reverse. 

From Epeiros in western Greece, c. 238 BCE. Dione was perhaps the mother goddess who presided over the oracle of Zeus at Dodona (in Epeiros). According to Hesiod, Dione was the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, and one of the wives of Zeus. In Homer she is the mother of Aphrodite (Iliad Book V line 380 etc).  Etymologically, the name "Dione" means a god, like "Zeus" and the Roman "Diana".The account of Phoenician religion quoted by Eusebius (who gives the author's name as Sanchuniathon) identifies Dione with Ba'alat Gebal (the Lady of Byblos), the sister of Asherah and Ashtart. 

On the other side, an obelisk.

A coin from Aegeai in Cilicia, 33 BCE. On the front a typical Alexander-head. The head was originally based on the young Herakles and on coins it tends to represent a god rather than Alexander the Great himself -- it was still not considered proper to show mortals on coins. On the other side, a standing figure of the winged Nike, goddess of victory, with a laurel wreath and palm branch; also the name of the city and the date, in Roman format. Cilicia was by this time a Roman province, but the coin may mark the tricentenary of Alexander's important victory over the Persians in nearby Issus (333 BCE).