OINIDAI in AKARNANIA 219BC Zeus Man-Headed Bull Ancient Greek Coin i56252

Item: i56252

Authentic Ancient 

Coin of:

Greek city of 

Oiniadai
 
in
Akarnania


Bronze 22mm (5.98 grams) Struck circa 219-211 B.C.

Reference:
HGC 4, 899; Sear 2298 var.; BMC Central, pp. 189-190, nos. 6-14; BCD 
Akarnania 345-352
Pedigree: Ex-BCD Collection
Laureate head of Zeus right.
OINIAΔAN, Bearded head of river-god Achelous 
right.

In the extreme south of the country, near the mouth of the Achelous, 
Oiniadai was close to the Aitolian border.

 You are bidding on the exact item pictured, 

Authenticity.

In
Greek mythology
, Achelous was the patron 
deity of the “silver-swirling”
Achelous River
, which is the largest river of 
Greece, and thus the chief of all river deities, every river having its own 
river spirit. His name is pre-Greek, its meaning unknown. The Greeks invented 
etymologies to associate it with Greek word roots (one such popular etymology 
translates the name as “he who washes away care”). However, these are 
etymologically unsound and of much later origin than the name itself.

Achelous was often reduced to a bearded mask, an inspiration for the 
medieval

Green Mann. Floor mosaic,

Zeugma, Turkey.

Origin

Hercules and Achelous in a Roman wall painting from the
Hall of the Augustales

Some Greek sources say that he was the son of Gaia and
Oceanus
; however, ancient Greeks generally 
believed with Hesiod that
Tethys
and
Oceanus
were the parents of all three thousand 
river gods. In the Renaissance, the improvisatory mythographer Natalis Comes 
made for his parents
Gaia
and
Helios
,
Homer
placed Achelous above all, the origin of 
all the world’s fresh water. By Roman times, Homer’s reference was interpreted 
as making Achelous “prince of rivers”.

Others derived the legends about Achelous from Egypt, and describe him as a 
second
Nilus
. But however this may be, he was from the 
earliest times considered to be a great divinity throughout Greece, and was 
invoked in prayers, sacrifices, on taking oaths, &c., and the
oracular Zeus at Dodona
usually added to each 
oracle he gave, the command to offer sacrifices to Achelous. This wide extent of 
the worship of Achelous also accounts for his being regarded as the 
representative of sweet water in general, that is, as the source of all 
nourishment.

Mythological tradition

Achelous was a suitor for
Deianeira
, daughter of
Oeneus
king of
Calydon
, but was defeated by
Heracles
, who wed her himself.
Sophocles
pictures a mortal woman’s terror at 
being courted by a chthonic river god:

‘My suitor was the river Achelóüs,

who took three forms to ask me of my father:

a rambling bull once, then a writhing snake

of gleaming colors, then again a man

with ox-like face: and from his beard’s dark shadows

stream upon stream of water tumbled down.

Such was my suitor.’ (Sophocles, Trachiniae, tr. Robert Torrance)

bronze
coin struck in
Oiniadai
219-211 BC depicting
river-god
Achelous as man-faced
bull
on reverse

The rivalry of Hercules and the river-god Achelous is depicted in 
this plaque by
Annibale Fontana
. The Walters Art 
Museum.

The contest of Achelous with Heracles was represented on the throne of
Amyclae
, and in the treasury of the
Megarans
at
Olympia
there was a statue of him made by
Dontas
of cedarwood and gold. On several coins 
of Acarnania
the god is represented as a bull with 
the head of an old man.

The sacred bull
, the
serpent
and the
Minotaur
are all creatures associated with the 
Earth goddess Gaia. Achelous was most often depicted as a gray-haired old man or 
a vigorous bearded man in his prime, with a horned head and a serpent-like body. 
When he battled Heracles over the river nymph Deianeira, Achelous turned himself 
into a bull. Heracles tore off one of his horns and forced the god to surrender. 
Achelous had to trade the goat horn of
Amalthea
to get it back. Heracles gave it to 
the
Naiads
, who transformed it into the
cornucopia
. Achelous relates the bitter episode 
afterwards to Theseus
in

Ovid‘s
Metamorphoses
.
Sophocles
makes Deianeira relate these 
occurrences in a somewhat different manner.

The mouth of the Achelous river was the spot where
Alcmaeon
finally found peace from the
Erinyes
. Achelous offered him Callirhoe, his 
daughter, in marriage if Alcmaeon would retrieve the clothing and jewelry his 
mother Eriphyle
had been wearing when she sent her 
husband Amphiaraus
to his death. Alcmaeon had to 
retrieve the clothes from King
Phegeus
, who sent his sons to kill Alcmaeon.

The Banquet of Achelous (ca. 1615), by
Rubens

Ovid
in his Metamorphoses provided a 
descriptive interlude when
Theseus
is the guest of Achelous, waiting for 
the river’s raging flood to subside: “He entered the dark building, made of 
spongy pumice, and rough tuff. The floor was moist with soft moss, and the 
ceiling banded with freshwater mussel and oyster shells.” In sixteenth-century 
Italy, an aspect of the revival of Antiquity was the desire to recreate 
Classical spaces as extensions of the revived
villa
. Ovid’s description of the cave of 
Achelous provided some specific inspiration to patrons in France as well as 
Italy for the Mannerist
garden
grotto
, with its cool dampness,

tuff vaulting and shellwork walls. The banquet served by Ovid’s 
Achelous offered a prototype for Italian midday feasts in the fountain-cooled 
shade of garden grottoes.

At the mouth of the Achelous River lie the
Echinades
Islands. According to Ovid’s pretty 
myth-making in the same Metamorphoses episode, the Echinades Islands were 
once five nymphs. Unfortunately for them, they forgot to honor Achelous in their 
festivities, and the god was so angry about this slight that he turned them into 
the islands.

Achelous was sometimes the father of the
Sirens
by
Terpsichore
, or in a later version, they are 
from the blood he shed where Heracles broke off his horn.

In another mythic context, the Achelous was said to be formed by the tears of
Niobe
, who fled to
Mount Sipylus
after the deaths of her husband 
and children.

In Hellenistic and Roman contexts, the river god was often reduced to a mask 
and used decoratively as an emblem of water, “his uncut hair wreathed with 
reeds”. The feature survived in Romanesque carved details and flowered duruing 
the Middle Ages
as one of the Classical prototypes 
of the Green Man.

Achelous and 
the River Achelous

The origin of the river Achelous is thus described by
Servius
:

When Achelous on one occasion had lost his daughters, the
Sirens
, and in his grief invoked his mother 
Gaea, she received him to her bosom, and on the spot where she received him, 
she caused the river bearing his name to gush forth.

Other accounts about the origin of the river and its name are given by
Stephanus of Byzantium
,
Strabo
, and
Plutarch
.
Strabo
proposes a very ingenious interpretation 
of the legends about Achelous, all of which according to him arose from the 
nature of the river itself. It resembled a bull’s voice in the noise of the 
water; its windings and its reaches gave rise to the story about his forming 
himself into a serpent and about his horns; the formation of islands at the 
mouth of the river requires no explanation. His conquest by Heracles lastly 
refers to the embankments by which Heracles confined the river to its bed and 
thus gained large tracts of land for cultivation, which are expressed by the 
horn of plenty.

In the
ancient Greek
 
religion, Zeus was the 
“Father of Gods and men” (πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν 
τε)
who ruled the Olympians of
Mount Olympus
 
as a father ruled the family. He was the
god of sky
 
and
thunder
 
in
Greek mythology
. 
His
Roman
 
counterpart is
Jupiter
 
and
Etruscan
 
counterpart is Tinia
.

Zeus was the child of
Cronus
 
and
Rhea
, 
and the youngest of his siblings. In most traditions he was married to

Hera, although, at the 
oracle of Dodona
, 
his consort was
Dione
: 
according to the Iliad
, 
he is the father of
Aphrodite
 
by Dione. He is known for his erotic escapades. These resulted in many godly and 
heroic offspring, including
Athena
,
Apollo
 
and Artemis
,
Hermes
,
Persephone
 
(by Demeter
),
Dionysus
,
Perseus
,
Heracles
,
Helen of Troy
,
Minos
, 
and the  Muses
 
(by Mnemosyne
); 
by Hera, he is usually said to have fathered

Ares,
Hebe
 
and Hephaestus
.

Walter Burkert 
points out in his book, Greek Religion, “Even the gods who are not his 
natural children address him as Father, and all the gods rise in his presence.” 
For the Greeks, he was the
King of the Gods
, 
who oversaw the universe. As
Pausanias
 
observed, “That Zeus is king in heaven is a saying common to all men”. In 
Hesiod’s Theogony
 
Zeus assigns the various gods their roles. In the  Homeric Hymns he is 
referred to as the chieftain of the gods.

His symbols are the
thunderbolt
,
eagle
,
bull
, 
and oak
. 
In addition to his Indo-European inheritance, the classical “cloud-gatherer” 
also derives certain iconographic traits from the cultures of the
Ancient Near East
, 
such as the

scepter

Acarnania is a region of west-central
Greece
that lies along the
Ionian Sea
, west of
Aetolia
, with the
Achelous River
for a boundary, and north of the 
gulf of Calydon
, which is the entrance to the
Gulf of Corinth
. Today it forms the western 
part of the
regional unit
of
Aetolia-Acarnania
. The capital and principal 
city in ancient times was
Stratos
. The north side of Acarnania of the
Corinthian Gulf
was considered part of the 
region of Epirus
.

Acarnania’s foundation in
Greek mythology
was traditionally ascribed to
Acarnan
, son of
Alcmaeon
.

Ancient Greek Northern regions

History

Classical

Map of ancient Acarnania.

In the 7th century BC,^[2] 
Greek influence in the region becomes prominent when
Corinth
settled Anactorium, Sollium and
Leucas
, and
Kefalonia
settled Astacus. Settlements in 
Alyzeia, Coronta, Limnaea, Medion,
Oeniadae
, Palaerus, Phytia and
Stratus
are also mentioned by
Thucydides
, this latter city being the seat of 
a loose confederation of Acarnanian powers that was maintained until the late 
1st century BC.

Because it is located strategically on the maritime route to Italy, Acarnania 
was emmired in many wars. In 5th century BC, the
Corinthians
were forced out of their Acarnanian 
settlements by Athens
. In 4th century BC, c. 390 BC, the 
cities of Acarnania surrendered to the
Spartans
under
King Agesilaus
, and continued to be Spartan 
allies until joining the
Second Athenian Empire
in 375 BC. The 
Acarnanians later sided with
Boeotia
in their fight against Sparta, and with 
Athens against
Philip II of Macedon
at
Chaeronea
.

Acarnania thereafter came under Macedonian rule. In 314 BC, at the behest of 
Macedonian king
Cassander
, the settlements of Acarnania lying 
near the Aetolian
border were conglomerated into fewer, 
larger settlements. Still, border conflicts with the Aetolians were frequent, 
and led to Acarnania’s territory being partitioned between Aetolia and
Epirus
, c. 250 BC. After the fall of the king 
of Epirus, the Acarnanian territory that had been given to Epirus regained its 
independence, and gained
Leucas
from Epirus, which became the capital of 
the region.

Acarnania allied itself with
Philip V of Macedon
against Rome in 200 BC, 
although it lost Leucas
because of this, and the city of
Thyrreion
was anointed the new capital.

In the 1st century BC, Acarnania suffered greatly at the hands of
pirates
, and in
Rome’s civil wars
. Afterwards, the towns and 
settlements of Acarnania fell under the rule of
Nicopolis
.

Byzantine

When the
Byzantine Empire
broke up (1204), Acarnania 
passed to the
Despotate of Epirus
and in 1348 it was 
conquered by Serbia. Then in 1480 it fell to the
Ottoman Empire
. Since 1832 it has been part of 
Greece.

Modern

Geography

Acarnania is composed of three main regions: 1) a rocky coastline, 2) a 
rugged strip of mountain range that follows the coastline, and 3) plains lying 
between these mountains and the
Achelous River
.