BITHYNIA. Nikaia. Circa 74-62 BC (?). Chalkous (Bronze, 11 mm, 1.37 g, 4 h). Female head to right, wearing wreath of grain ears (?).
Rev. NIKAIEΩN Head of a bull to right, looking facing; below ground line, two monograms. BMC -. RG -. SNG Copenhagen -. SNG Tübingen -. SNG Turkey -. SNG von Aulock -. Weiser -. Unpublished and unique, and of great numismatic importance. Very fine.
From a European collection, formed before 2005.
The autonomous coinage of Nikaia is of the utmost rarity. Waddington knew of only two specimens: one, a unique bronze coin of 18 mm from his own collection (RG 1), is also illustrated in HGC 7, 593 . Its obverse likely depicts the head of Dionysos, while the reverse features a bull charging right beneath the ethnic legend NIKAIEΩN. In the HGC, it is dated without commentary to around 300-280 BC - that is, to the period after the city's refounding by Lysimachos in 301 BC (previously known as Antigoneia) and before its conquest by the Bithynian king Zipoites in 282/1 BC. This is taken from RG, where Waddington, however, presents a more nuanced interpretation upon closer reading: 'on peut hésiter entre la période qui s'écoula depuis le mort de Lysimaque (281) jusqu'à l'annexion bithynuienne et une des éclipses de la domination romaine au temps des guerres mithradatiques' ('One might waver between dating it to the period from the death of Lysimachos in 281 BC up to the Bithynian annexation, or to one of the episodes when Roman authority waned during the Mithridatic Wars' (RG p. 51)). Waddington was evidently uncertain where to place the autonomous coin, given the city's long history under Bithynian royal control. Unfortunately, his specimen is weakly struck and poorly preserved, making interpretation difficult.
The second known specimen features a head of Dionysos on the obverse and a Nike on the reverse, again with the ethnic NIKAIEΩN (RG 12; HGC 7, 595). Waddington placed it without comment among the issues of C. Vibius Pansa under Julius Caesar, presumably due to the similar reverse type. Yet it remains curious that a coin from the Pansa emission should carry neither a date nor the name of a proconsul. Moreover, the depiction of a Nike holding a palm branch is a widespread and generic motif in Greek coinage - far too common to support any firm conclusions, especially in the case of a city that itself bears the name of the goddess of victory.
With the emergence of the present piece, we now have a third autonomous coin from Nikaia. It differs from the other two not only in its markedly smaller size, but also in iconography. The obverse shows a head adorned with a wreath - possibly laurel (Apollo?), ivy (Dionysos?), or grain (Demeter? Kore?). The reverse displays a distinctively arranged bull's head (thus reminiscent of Waddington's charging bull issue), above which the ethnic legend curves along the flan; in the exergue are two monograms. The reverse design - including the baseline and monograms - argues against an early Hellenistic date. A more plausible context is the 1st century BC. It may, as Waddington proposed for his own coin, represent an autonomous issue from the Mithridatic Wars - a time when Bithynian king Nicomedes IV was twice driven from power and Nikaia may have issued autonomous coins. More likely, however, the piece was struck after the king's death in 74 BC, following his testamentary bequest of his realm to Rome. At that moment, Nikaia, no longer under royal control, may have celebrated its newly gained autonomy by issuing its own coinage - before beginning, from 62/1 BC onward, to mint coins bearing the names of Roman proconsuls such as C. Papirius Carbo. Perhaps the two other autonomous issues also belong to this transitional period.
Ultimately, a precise dating remains difficult due to the lack of comparative material and the poor state of preservation across all three coins. What is certain, however, is that Nikaia’s autonomous coinage ranks among the great rarities of Asia Minor numismatics - a remarkable fact for so prominent a city, and one that points to extremely limited emissions. With the piece now before us, we can at least count three known types - all awaiting further study.
