ATTICA. Athens. Under Lachares, 296/5 BC. Stater (Gold, 17 mm, 8.59 g, 6 h). Head of Athena to right, wearing crested Attic helmet decorated with three olive leaves and palmette, circular earring and necklace. Rev. AΘE Owl standing right, head facing; to left, olive sprig and crescent; in field to right, Eleusis ring. BMC 129-3. Boston MFA 1099. Gulbenkian 925. HGC 4, 1577. SNG Copenhagen 83. Svoronos pl. 21, 1-17. Very rare and of exceptional historical interest, belonging to one of the very few gold issues ever struck at Athens. Minor scrapes and scratches and a few deposits and with light doubling on the obverse, otherwise, very fine.


The present gold stater belongs to one of the most remarkable emergency issues in the history of Athenian coinage. Gold was only exceptionally struck at Athens, and the appearance of this denomination is best understood against the extreme political and military pressures surrounding the siege of the city by Demetrios I Poliorketes in 295 BC. The issue has traditionally been associated with Lachares, whose rule has often been reduced in the older literature to that of a conventional tyrant. More recent scholarship has considerably complicated this picture: Lachares first emerges as a general and commander of mercenary forces during a period of violent civic conflict, and his rise to power is better understood within the context of Athenian stasis than as the straightforward coup of an isolated despot. Only subsequently did the literary tradition crystallize around the familiar image of the impious and rapacious tyrant.

The numismatic evidence nevertheless provides strong grounds for connecting this gold coinage with the crisis of 295 BC. In particular, the series bearing the so-called Eleusis ring beside the owl, to which the present coin belongs, has been persuasively associated by Kroll with Lachares’ final defence of Athens against Demetrios. Its exceptional metal is as significant as its date: in striking gold rather than the ubiquitous silver of the Athenian owls, the city was evidently drawing upon extraordinary reserves at a moment when its normal resources had been placed under severe strain.

Ancient testimony records that Lachares appropriated sacred treasures from the Acropolis, including gold associated with the image of Athena (Paus. 1.25.7), while the fragmentary historical account preserved in P.Oxy. XVII 2082 explicitly connects the use of such resources with the payment of foreign troops. The sacrilege quickly entered the comic tradition: Athenaeus preserves the memorable charge that Lachares had 'stripped Athena naked' (Ath. 9.405f-406a; Demetrios II, Areopagites fr. 1 K-A). The issue is therefore best understood as an emergency coinage struck for Lachares’ defence of Athens in 295 BC, probably drawing upon the sacred gold appropriated from the Acropolis.

Lachares himself escaped the fall of Athens and disappears into a conflicting later tradition: while Pausanias has him murdered at Koroneia for the wealth he was thought to carry, Polyainos records further adventures in Thebes, Sestos and Lysimacheia, and places him at Kassandreia as late as 279 BC. The staters thus remain extraordinary material witnesses to a moment when Athens’ civic, military, and religious resources were all placed under exceptional pressure: their deliberately traditional types proclaim continuity with the monetary identity of classical Athens, while their unprecedented metal reveals just how extraordinary the circumstances of their production had become.