PLAKIA in MYSIA 350BC Cybele Lion Genuine Authentic Ancient Greek Coin i46655

Item: i46655

Authentic Ancient

Coin of:

Greek city of

Mysia
Bronze 12mm (1.48 grams) Struck circa 350 B.C.

Reference: Sear 3983; B.M.C.15.174,5
Head of Kybele right, wearing turreted headdress, hair rolled.
ΠΛAKIA above lion right, devouring prey; ear of
corn beneath.
> Plakia was located on the shores of the Propontis, to the east of Kyzikos.

You are bidding on the exact item pictured,

Authenticity.

Cybele 
(Phrygian:
Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya “Kubeleyan Mother”, perhaps “Mountain
Mother”;
Lydian
Kuvava;
Greek
: Kybele,) was an originally
Anatolian

mother goddess
. Little is known of her oldest
Anatolian cults, other than her association with mountains, hawks and lions. She
may have been Phrygia
‘s state deity; her Phrygian cult was
adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of
Asia Minor
and spread from there to mainland
Greece and its more distant
western colonies
from around the 6th century
BCE.

In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated
to aspects of the Earth-goddess
Gaia
, her
Minoan
equivalent
Rhea
, and the Corn-Mother goddess
Demeter
. Some city-states, notably
Athens
, evoked her as a protector, but her most
celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign,
exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment
of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek
religion, she had a
transgender
or
eunuch

mendicant
priesthood. Many of her Greek cults
included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort
Attis
, who was probably a Greek invention. In
Greece, Cybele is associated with
mountains
, town and city walls, fertile nature,
and wild animals, especially

lions.

In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater (“Great Mother”). The Roman State
adopted and developed a particular form of her cult, and claimed her
conscription as a key religious component in their success against Carthage
during the Punic Wars
.
Roman mythographers
reinvented her as a

Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by
way of the Trojan prince
Aeneas
. With Rome’s eventual
hegemony
over the Mediterranean world,
Romanised forms of Cybele’s cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The
meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and
dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship.

Hercules, made temporarily insane by the goddess Hera,
murdered his wife and children. Once recovered, and distressed by his actions,
Hercules consulted the


Delphic
Oracle to find a means of expiating his sin. As a punishment, Apollo replied
that the hero would have to serve his cousin Eurystheus, the king Tiryns, a man
whom Hercules despised, for a period of twelve years. Because Eurystheus also
hated Hercules, he devised a series of ten feats of such difficulty that they
would be either insurmountable, or Hercules would die in the attempt. Because
Hercules received assistance in completing two of the tasks, Eurystheus added
two more. Each labor became more fantastic, and eventually Hercules was
compelled to break the bonds of the supernatural in order to complete his task.
Once he accomplished the Labors, Hercules was absolved of his guilt, and
proceeded to perform many other heroic feats.The First Labor was to slay the
Nemean Lion and bring back its skin. The Nemean Lion, called thus as it had been
terrorizing the area around Nemea, had a skin so thick that it was impenetrable
to weapons. After making futile attempts to subdue it with his weapons, Hercules
cast them aside and wrestled the lion to the ground, eventually killing it by
thrusting his arm down its throat and choking it to death. Skinning the beast
was no easy task, either. After Hercules spent hours trying unsuccessfully to
skin the lion, Athena, in the guise of an old crone, appeared to him, and
convinced him to use the creature’s own claws to cut the hide. Thereafter, the
hide became the hero’s own impenetrable armor. When Eurystheus saw Hercules
wearing his new fearsome outfit, he hid in a large bronze jar, and thenceforth
commanded the hero through a herald.

Leo
is one of the
constellations
of the
zodiac
, lying between
Cancer
to the west and
Virgo
to the east. Its name is
Latin
for

lion, and to the
ancient Greeks
represented the
Nemean Lion
killed by the mythical Greek hero
Heracles
(known to the
ancient Romans
as
Hercules
) as one of his
twelve labors.
Its symbol is

( ♌). One of the 48 constellations described by the
2nd century astronomer
Ptolemy
, Leo remains one of the 88 modern
constellations today, and one of the most easily recognizable due to its many
bright stars and a distinctive shape that is reminiscent of the crouching lion
it depicts. The lion’s mane and shoulders also form an
asterism