ATTICA. Athens. Circa 440s BC. Didrachm (Silver, 21 mm, 7.85 g, 9 h). Head of Athena to right, wearing crested Attic helmet decorated with three olive leaves and palmette. Rev. AΘE Owl standing right, head facing; to left, olive sprig and crescent; all within incuse square within circular incuse. HGC 4, -. Kroll -. Seltman -. Starr -. Svoronos pl. 11, 18. Of the highest rarity, the finest of apparently only two known examples, and of exceptional importance for the numismatic history of the Athenian owl coinage. Minor horn silver and traces of cleaning, and with a small dig on the reverse, otherwise, very fine.


The famous Athenian Owls have been the subject of scholarly study since the 19th century. It is therefore all the more remarkable that this extraordinary didrachm type, although already recorded by Svoronos in his monumental corpus – where he illustrates a single pierced specimen in Berlin – has been almost entirely overlooked by subsequent scholarship. Later literature discusses only the didrachms belonging to the famous and much-studied dekadrachm series, struck in the 460s BC as part of a complete denominational system comprising pieces of 10, 4, 2 and 1 drachms, together with fractional denominations.

The present coin and the Berlin specimen, however, differ markedly from those earlier didrachms. They are already executed in the Classical style that became established after the transitional period of 455-449 BC and that would come to characterize the massive output of Athenian coinage in the second half of the 5th century BC. The change is evident not only in the overall style, but also, and particularly clearly, in the treatment of the olive branch. On the didrachms of the 460s BC, the olive and the leaves hang downward, with the left-hand leaf projecting beyond the incuse in an elegant visual device that lends the design additional depth. On the present coin, by contrast, we already find the familiar Classical arrangement: one horizontal and one vertical leaf, with the olive suspended diagonally between them.

Stylistically, the coin clearly belongs to the beginning of Athens’ Classical coinage. The relatively small square incuse set within a circular incuse field still looks back to the preceding didrachms of the Kimonian period, while the style of Athena and the owl, together with the rendering of the olive branch, already incorporates the innovations that would define the Classical Owl series. The coin thus occupies a particularly revealing position between the earlier transitional issues and the mature mass coinage of Classical Athens.

Why Athens chose to strike didrachms again in the 440s-430s BC remains unknown. Their extreme rarity, however – the present coin appears to be the first example to have come to light since the publication of Svoronos’ work more than a century ago – shows that this renewed issue of the denomination must have been produced on only a very limited scale. More revealingly, its apparent brevity suggests that the didrachm ultimately found no lasting place within the Athenian monetary system. By the Periklean period, the tetradrachm had become firmly established as the principal large silver denomination and as an international currency of the eastern Mediterranean, while drachms and smaller denominations served transactions at lower values. The didrachm occupied an intermediate position for which there was evidently little practical demand. This exceptional second issue may therefore represent a short-lived attempt to reintroduce the denomination before it was abandoned altogether.

Together with the specimen published by Svoronos, the present coin therefore offers an exceptional glimpse into a brief and little-understood episode of Athenian minting shortly after the middle of the 5th century BC. That this issue has gone virtually unnoticed in modern scholarship despite more than a century of intensive study of Athenian coinage only adds to its significance. As one of just two surviving witnesses to this short-lived revival of the didrachm denomination, the present coin provides exceedingly rare and important evidence for the evolution of Athens’ monetary system at the dawn of the Classical period.