Coins | In Focus | Coins of Alexander the Great
Coins of Alexander the Great
A splendid gold stater struck in the name of Philip II was acquired in 2002, and can be seen in the current exhibition Talking Coins alongside its 3rd-century-BC Roman interpretation. On Philip’s stater the youthful and fine portrait of Apollo, legendary ancestor of the royal house of Macedon, has the features of young Alexander, and this iconography appears in the silver didrachms struck in Rome a century later. Alexander’s own coins in the Barber Collection range from a gold stater to tiny silver obols. Powerful images of female and male deities adorn the coins and allude to symbols of wisdom, victory and royal power.
Alexander’s
silver obols echo the new resources and sheer size of the area conquered
by Alexander. His army’s expedition across Egypt and the former Persian
empire as far as Bactria (modern Afghanistan) and India netted him the
hoarded treasures of Pharaohs and Achaemenids. Coinage was now introduced
on an enormous scale, with mints opened in Asia Minor, the Levant, Egypt
and at Babylon, producing gold, silver and bronze coins.
Alexander's conquests in the late 4th century BC bridged East and West and created a vast and unique empire, where local traditions blended with Greek culture, resulting in a fascinating new world where the Greek language provided the common thread.
This
was an exciting era, and the coinage of Alexander’s Macedonian successors—his
former generals—conveys in its perfection their ideals and political ideology.
Designs are of the highest quality and often very realistic. The portrait
of Alexander, introduced on coins of Ptolemy I, Lysimachus and Seleucus,
was gradually followed by his generals’ own portraits. The Barber possesses
a beautiful silver tetradrachm of Lysimachus struck after 281 BC. During
his visit to the oracle of the Egyptian deity Zeus Ammon in Siwah (Egypt,
331 BC), Alexander received divine honours for the first time, and the
obverse design of the tetradrachm is an impressive portrait of him, wearing
the ram's horn of Ammon, underlining his – and his successors’ – divinity.
These later coins, struck after his death, show Alexander’s gradual transition
from historical reality to culture-hero, later worshipped by the Arabs
as Iskandar Dhuílquarnein (two-horned Alexander), and finding his place
among the prophets in Sura 18 of the Quran. Many medieval and renaissance
rulers claimed legitimacy through asserting they were valiant successors
of the young Macedonian king, who left at his death an empire stretching
from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Indus River.
The Master of the Griselda Legend (Italian artist, active c.1500) offers a glimpse of this 16th-century ideal in his painting Alexander the Great, which once adorned a Siennese palace and is now in the Barber. The youthful soldier Alexander stands on an inscription-bearing base, which serves as a constant reminder to the important family of Piccolomini of the virtues of an ideal ruler:
‘I Alexander, who conquered the whole world with my own strength, shook off the flames of desire from my heart. It is of no avail to rejoice in the outward triumphs of war if the mind lies sick and rages within’.