|
Greek city of Alexandria Troas in Troas Pseudo-Autonomous Issue
Bronze 20mm (6.38 grams) Struck circa 253-268 A.D.
Reference: Bellinger, Troy 483
Certification: NGC Ancients AU 4680935-012
CO ALEX TRO, Turreted bust of City-goddess, Tyche right; vexillum behind.
COL AV TROA, Apollo, head right and holding lyre, seated facing on griffin springing right, head left.
Though the griffin is not specifically associated with Apollo Smintheus, it does allude to his journey to the Hyperboreans whose gold was guarded by griffins. Very rare.
A coastal city situated south-west of Ilion, it was founded circa 310 B.C. by Antigonos and originally bore the name Antigoneia. A decade later Lysimachos renamed the place Alexandreia.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
In Greek mythology the Hyperboreans were a mythical race of giants who lived “beyond the North Wind”. The Greeks thought that Boreas, the god of the North Wind (one of the Anemoi, or “Winds”) lived in Thrace, and therefore Hyperborea indicates a region that lay far to the north of Thrace.
This land was supposed to be perfect, with the sun shining twenty-four hours a day, which to modern ears suggests a possible location within the Arctic Circle during the Midnight Sun-time of year. However, it is also possible that Hyperborea had no real physical location at all, for according to the classical Greek poet Pindar,
neither by ship nor on foot would you find
the marvellous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans.
Pindar also described the otherworldly perfection of the Hyperboreans:
Never the Muse is absent
from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry
and everywhere maiden choruses whirling.
Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed
in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live.
Herodotus
The earliest extant source that mentions Hyperborea in detail, Herodotus’s Histories (Book IV, Chapters 32-36), dates from circa 450 BC. However, Herodotus recorded three earlier sources that supposedly mentioned the Hyperboreans, including Hesiod and Homer, the latter purportedly having written of Hyperborea in his lost work Epigoni: “if that be really a work of his”. Herodotus also wrote that the 7th-century BC poet Aristeas wrote of the Hyperboreans in a poem (now lost) called Arimaspea about a journey to the Issedones, who are estimated to have lived in the Kazakh Steppe. Beyond these lived the one-eyed Arimaspians, further on the gold-guarding griffins, and beyond these the Hyperboreans. Herodotus assumed that Hyperborea lay somewhere in Northeast Asia.
Pindar, Simonides of Ceos and Hellanicus of Lesbos, contemporaries of Herodotus in the 5th century BC, each briefly described or referenced the Hyperboreans in their works.
Hyperboreans in Delos
Alone among the Twelve Olympians, Apollo was venerated among the Hyperboreans, the Hellenes thought: he spent his winter amongst them. According to Herodotus, offerings from the Hyperboreans came to Scythia packed with straw, and they were passed from tribe to tribe until they arrived at Dodona and from them to other Greek peoples until they to came to Apollo’s temple on Delos. He says they used this method because the first time the gifts were brought by two maidens, Hyperoche and Laodice, with a escort of five men, but none of them returned. To prevent that, since then the Hyperboreans brought the gifts to their borders and asked they neighbours to deliver them to the next country and so on until they arrived to Delos.
Herodotus also details that other two virgin maidens, Arge and Opis, had come from Hyperborea to Delos before, as a tribute to the goddess Ilithyia for ease of child-bearing, accompanied by the gods themselves. The maidens received honours in Delos, where the women collected gifts from them and sang hymns to them.
 Tyche (meaning “luck”; Roman equivalent: Fortuna) was the presiding tutelary deity that governed the fortune and prosperity of a city, its destiny. She is the daughter of Aphrodite and Zeus or Hermes.
In literature, she might be given various genealogies, as a daughter of Hermes and Aphrodite, or considered as one of the Oceanids, daughters of Oceanus and Tethys, or of Zeus. She was connected with Nemesis and Agathos Daimon (“good spirit”).
The Greek historian Polybius believed that when no cause can be discovered to events such as floods, droughts, frosts or even in politics, then the cause of these events may be fairly attributed to Tyche.
Worship
Increasingly during the Hellenistic period, cities venerated their own specific iconic version of Tyche, wearing a mural crown (a crown like the walls of the city).
Tyche had temples at Caesarea Maritima, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. In Alexandria the Tychaeon, the temple of Tyche, was described by Libanius as one of the most magnificent of the entire Hellenistic world.
She was uniquely venerated at Itanos in Crete, as Tyche Protogeneia, linked with the Athenian Protogeneia (“firstborn”), daughter of Erechtheus, whose self-sacrifice saved the city.
Stylianos Spyridakis concisely expressed Tyche’s appeal in a Hellenistic world of arbitrary violence and unmeaning reverses: “In the turbulent years of the Epigoni of Alexander, an awareness of the instability of human affairs led people to believe that Tyche, the blind mistress of Fortune, governed mankind with an inconstancy which explained the vicissitudes of the time.”
Depictions
Tyche appears on many coins of the Hellenistic period in the three centuries before the Christian era, especially from cities in the Aegean. Unpredictable turns of fortune drive the complicated plotlines of Hellenistic romances, such as Leucippe and Clitophon or Daphnis and Chloe. She experienced a resurgence in another era of uneasy change, the final days of publicly sanctioned Paganism, between the late-fourth-century emperors Julian and Theodosius I who definitively closed the temples. The effectiveness of her capricious power even achieved respectability in philosophical circles during that generation, though among poets it was a commonplace to revile her for a fickle harlot.
In medieval art, she was depicted as carrying a cornucopia, an emblematic ship’s rudder, and the wheel of fortune, or she may stand on the wheel, presiding over the entire circle of fate.
The constellation of Virgo is sometimes identified as the heavenly figure of Tyche, as well as other goddesses such as Demeter and Astraea.
Alexandria Troas (“Alexandria of the Troad”, modern Turkish: Eski Stambul) is an ancient Greek city situated on the Aegean Sea near the northern tip of Turkey’s western coast, a little south of Tenedos (modern Bozcaada). It is located in the modern Turkish province of Çanakkale. The site sprawls over an estimated 400 hectares (1,000 acres); among the few structures still extant today are a ruined bath and gymnasium complex and a recently uncovered stadium.
Hellenistic
According to Strabo, this site was first called Sigeia; around 306 BC Antigonus refounded the city as the much-expanded Antigonia Troas by settling the people of five other towns in Sigeia, including the once influential city of Neandria. Its name was changed by Lysimachus to Alexandria Troas, in memory of Alexander III of Macedon (Pliny merely states that the name changed from Antigonia to Alexandria). As the chief port of north-west Asia Minor, the place prospered greatly in Roman times, becoming a “free and autonomous city” as early as 188 BC,[3] and the existing remains sufficiently attest its former importance. In its heyday, the city may have had a population of about 100,000. Strabo mentions that a Roman colony was created at the location in the reign of Augustus, named Colonia Alexandria Augusta Troas (called simply Troas during this period). Augustus, Hadrian and the rich grammarian Herodes Atticus contributed greatly to its embellishment; the aqueduct still preserved is due to the latter. Constantine considered making Troas the capital of the Roman Empire.
Roman
In Roman times, it was a significant port for travelling between Anatolia and Europe. Paul of Tarsus sailed for Europe for the first time from Alexandria Troas and returned there from Europe (it was there that the episode of the raising of Eutychus later occurred). Ignatius of Antioch also paused at this city before continuing to his martyrdom at Rome.
Byzantine
Several of its later bishops are known: Marinus in 325; Niconius in 344; Sylvanus at the beginning of the 5th century; Pionius in 451; Leo in 787; Peter, friend of the Patriarch Ignatius, and adversary to Michael, in the ninth century. In the 10th century Troas is given as a suffragan of Cyzicus and distinct from the famous Troy (Heinrich Gelzer, Ungedruckte … Texte der Notitiae episcopatuum, 552; Georgii Cyprii descriptio orbis romani, 64); it is not known when the city was destroyed and the diocese disappeared. The city remains a titular see of the Roman Catholic Church, Troadensis; the seat is vacant following the resignation of the last bishop in 1971.
Troas is also a titular see of the Orthodox Church under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The most recent hierarch, His Grace Bishop Savas (Zembillas) of Troas, served 2002-2011. He is now Metropolitan Savas (Zembillas) of Pittsburgh in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.
Ottoman
Karasid Turkomans settled in the area of the Troad in the 14th century. Their beylik was conquered by the Ottomans in 1336. The ruins of Alexandria Troas came to be known among the Turks as Eski Stambul, the “Old City”. The site’s stones were much plundered for building material (for example Mehmed IV took columns to adorn his Yeni Valide Mosque in Istanbul). As of the mid-18th century the site served as “a lurking place for bandetti”.
Modern
By 1911 the site had been overgrown with vallonea oaks and much plundered, but the circuit of the old walls could still be traced, and in several places they were fairly well preserved. They had a circumference of about ten kilometres, and were fortified with towers at regular intervals. Remains of an ancient bath and gymnasium complex can be found within this area; this building is locally known as Bal Saray (Honey Palace) and was originally endowed by Herodes Atticus in the year 135. Trajan built an aqueduct which can still be traced. The harbour had two large basins, now almost choked with sand. It is the subject of a recent study by German archaeologists who are digging and surveying at the site. Their excavation has uncovered the remains of a large stadium dating to about 100 BC.
|
