Mysia, Cyzicus. c. 450-330 BC

AV Stater, 16.09g (15.5mm, na)Silenos crouching right on tunny right, supporting amphora on left leg and with left hand pouring wine into cup he holds in his right / Quadripartite incuse square. References: Von Fritze I 172; Greenwell 42; Boston MFA 1505–6 = Warren 1462–3; CN Online Type –; HGC 8, 196Grade: Very rare, only three in CoinArchives. Beautifully struck and aEFgk2208In the spring of 410 BC, the waters off Cyzicus witnessed one of the most decisive battles of the Peloponnesian War. Alcibiades, recalled to command the Athenian fleet, lured the Spartan admiral Mindaros out of harbor, cut off his retreat, and destroyed or captured the entire Peloponnesian navy. Mindaros was killed, and the Spartans' terse dispatch home, intercepted by the Athenians, summed up the disaster: the ships were lost, the commander was dead, the men were starving, and no one knew what to do. Throughout these upheavals, and through the city's later return to Persian control under the King's Peace of 387 BC, the mint of Cyzicus kept producing its famous electrum staters. Trusted across the Aegean and the Black Sea alike, the Cyzicene remained one of the great international currencies of the Greek world until Alexander the Great's conquests brought a new imperial coinage to the region.The obverse of this stater offers a scene of pure Dionysian pleasure. Silenos, the aged and perpetually drunken companion of Dionysos, crouches on the city's emblematic tunny, an amphora balanced on his knee as he pours wine into the cup in his other hand. The choice had local resonance. Ancient tradition placed Silenos in Anatolia, where the Phrygian king Midas was said to have captured him by mixing wine into a spring from which he drank, and wine was among the most important goods moving through the Propontis on its way to the cities of the Black Sea. The engraver has rendered the old satyr with real character, his compact, heavy body tensed in the act of pouring, the whole composition fitted with remarkable skill into the curve of the flan. The type is represented in Canon Greenwell's foundational study of Cyzicene electrum and in the Warren collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, yet it remains unlisted in the CN Online typology.