A guide to the principal gold and silver coins of the ancients ...

54 PERIOD IV.
PERIOD IV.—CIRCA B.C. 336-280.
The age of Alexander and of tlie Diadochi is characterised,
as might be expected, by a very general cessation
throughout Greece of the issue of money by autonomous
states. The exceptions are, however, more numerous than
is at first sight apparent, for it is certain that, after Alexander's
death, some cities, although practically independent,
continued to issue their money in the name of Alexander.
The same remark applies to the gold and silver money of
several of Alexander's successors, especially at first.
In European Greece it would even appear that the gold
staters bearing Alexander's name continued to be struck
by the successive kings of Macedon down to Eoman
times ; for when the Roman general Flamininus issued
gold money in Greece, B.C. 197, he simply adopted the
Alexandrine stater, placing upon it his own name. He
would hardly have chosen this type, had not these coins
been current in his time.
In Italy, Neapolis, Tarentum, and Metapontum continued
to supply the greater part of the currency. The
earliest gold and silver coins bearing the name of the
Roman people were struck in Campania, from B.C. 338,
under Roman dominion. In Africa, Carthage, influenced
by the popularity in all the markets of Alexander's tetradrachms,
adopted his type, the head of Herakles in the
lion's skin ; not, however, to the exclusion of the head of
Persephone, which she had borrowed from Syracuse.
Artistically, the heads on the coins of this age are remarkable
for expression of feeling. The eye is generally
deeply set, and the brows strongly marked. True portraits
now make their first appearance on money. Ptolemy
Soter is, however, the first to place his own head, as such,
upon his coins, not under the semblance of a Greek divinity,
but wearing the plain royal diadem.
A frequent reverse-type is a seated figure, the general
aspect and pose of which is borrowed at first, more or less
directly, from the seated figure of Zeus Aetophoros on the
money of Alexander.