MYSIA. Kyzikos. Circa 450-330 BC. Stater (Electrum, 22 mm, 16.08 g, 2 h). Harmodios and Aristogeiton, back to back, advancing right on tunny to right; the one in front holding sword in his right hand and extending his left arm, around which his chlamys is wrapped; the one behind striking with sword in his raised right hand and holding scabbard in his left. Rev. Quadripartite incuse square. BMC 75. Boston MFA 1496 = Warren 1495. Gulbenkian 636. Jameson 2186. SNG Paris -. SNG von Aulock -. Von Fritze I, 120 and pl. IV, 6. Exceedingly rare and of great importance, a highly interesting type. The obverse struck slightly off center, otherwise, very fine.


This extraordinary type reproduces one of the most politically charged monuments of Classical Athens: the bronze group of the Tyrannicides Harmodios and Aristogeiton by Kritios and Nesiotes, erected in the Agora in 477/6 BC. The two men had killed the Athenian tyrant Hipparchos at the Panathenaia in 514 BC, but, as Thukydides stresses, their motives were rooted as much in a personal and erotic grievance as in opposition to tyranny; Hippias survived the attack and continued to rule for another four years, becoming markedly harsher after his brother’s death. It was only in 510 that Hippias was expelled, through the intervention of the Spartans and the Alkmaionidai. Athenian collective memory nevertheless transformed Harmodios and Aristogeiton into the liberators of the city and exemplary defenders of democratic freedom.

The first monument to the pair, traditionally attributed to Antenor, was carried off by Xerxes during the Persian occupation of Athens in 480 BC; the replacement by Kritios and Nesiotes thus came to embody resistance not only to domestic tyranny but also, in the aftermath of the Persian Wars, to foreign domination. The Kyzikene engraver follows this second group closely: Harmodios raises his sword for the famous downward blow, while Aristogeiton advances beside him with his cloak extended over his arm. Its erection in 477/6 provides a firm terminus post quem for the coin type, although attempts to date the staters much more precisely within the fifth century remain uncertain. Recent work by David Teegarden (D. A. Teegarden, The Athenian Empire and Resistance to Tyranny, in: Classics@ 23, 2023) has emphasized the exceptional importance of these Kyzikene staters as the only direct evidence for the reception of Harmodios and Aristogeiton within the Athenian archē.

That Kyzikos chose this unmistakably Athenian monument for its internationally circulating electrum is therefore unlikely to have been iconographically neutral: the city was adopting an image that had become inseparable from Athenian ideas of freedom, democracy, and resistance to tyranny. Yet, as always at Kyzikos, the borrowed image is immediately naturalized by the tunny beneath the figures, turning one of the most famous public monuments of Athens into a distinctly Kyzikene coin type.