ARPI in APULIA 325BC Zeus Kalydonian Boar PIG Spear Ancient Greek Coin i57541

Item: i57541

Authentic Ancient 

Coin of:

Greek city of 

Bronze 20mm (6.05 grams) Struck circa 325-275 B.C.
Reference: Sear 569; B.M.C.1.4; Siciliano, Arpi Group B, Series 1; HN Italy 642
ΔΑΙΟΥ, Laureate head of Zeus left, thunderbolt 
behind.
Kalydonian boar running right, spear-head above, APΠANΩΝ in exergue.

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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
.

As
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
. 
Zeus is frequently depicted by Greek artists in one of two poses: standing, 
striding forward, with a thunderbolt leveled in his raised right hand, or seated 
in majesty.

The Calydonian Boar is one of the monsters of
Greek mythology
that had to be overcome by 
heroes of the Olympian age. Sent by
Artemis
to ravage the region of
Calydon
in
Aetolia
because its king failed to honor her in 
his rites to the gods, it was killed in the Calydonian Hunt, in which 
many male heroes took part, but also a powerful woman,
Atalanta
, who won its hide by first wounding it 
with an arrow. This outraged some of the men, with tragic results.
Strabo
was under the impression that the 
Calydonian Boar was an offspring of the
Crommyonian Sow
vanquished by
Theseus
.

Importance in Greek mythology and art

The Calydonian Boar is one of the
chthonic
monsters in Greek mythology, each set 
in a specific locale. Sent by Artemis to ravage the region of Calydon in
Aetolia
, it met its end in the Calydonian 
Hunt, in which all the heroes of the new age pressed to take part, with the 
exception of Heracles
, who vanquished his own Goddess-sent
Erymanthian Boar
separately. Since the mythic 
event drew together numerous heroes—among whom were many who were venerated as 
progenitors of their local ruling houses among tribal groups of
Hellenes
into Classical times—the Calydonian 
Boar hunt offered a natural subject in classical art, for it was redolent with 
the web of myth that gathered around its protagonists on other occasions, around 
their half-divine descent and their offspring. Like the quest for the
Golden Fleece
(Argonautica) 
or the Trojan War
that took place the following 
generation, the Calydonian Hunt is one of the nodes in which much Greek myth 
comes together.

Both Homer
and
Hesiod
and their listeners were aware of the 
details of this myth, but no surviving complete account exists: some
papyrus
fragments found at
Oxyrhynchus
are all that survive of
Stesichorus
‘ telling; the myth repertory called

Bibliotheke
(“The Library”) contains the 
gist of the tale, and before that was compiled the Roman poet Ovid told the 
story in some colorful detail in his
Metamorphoses
.

Hunt

King Oeneus
(“wine man”) of
Calydon
, an ancient city of west-central
Greece
north of the
Gulf of Patras
, held annual harvest sacrifices 
to the gods on the sacred hill. One year the king forgot to include Great “Artemis 
of the Golden Throne” in his offerings Insulted, Artemis, the “Lady of the Bow”, 
loosed the biggest, most ferocious boar imaginable on the countryside of 
Calydon. It rampaged throughout the countryside, destroying vineyards and crops, 
forcing people to take refuge inside the city walls (Ovid), where they began to 
starve.

Oeneus sent messengers out to look for the best hunters in Greece, offering 
them the boar’s pelt and tusks as a prize.

Among those who responded were some of the
Argonauts
, Oeneus’ own son
Meleager
, and, remarkably for the Hunt’s 
eventual success, one woman— the huntress
Atalanta
, the “indomitable”, who had been 
suckled by Artemis as a she-bear and raised as a huntress, a proxy for Artemis 
herself (Kerenyi; Ruck and Staples). Artemis appears to have been divided in her 
motives, for it was also said that she had sent the young huntress because she 
knew her presence would be a source of division, and so it was: many of the men, 
led by Kepheus and Ankaios, refused to hunt alongside a woman. It was the 
smitten Meleager who convinced them. Nonetheless it was Atalanta who first 
succeeded in wounding the boar with an arrow, although Meleager finished it off, 
and offered the prize to Atalanta, who had drawn first blood. But the sons of 
Thestios, who considered it disgraceful that a woman should get the trophy where 
men were involved, took the skin from her, saying that it was properly theirs by 
right of birth, if Meleagros chose not to accept it. Outraged by this, Meleagros 
slew the sons of Thestios and again gave the skin to Atalanta (Bibliotheke). 
Meleager’s mother, sister of Meleager’s slain uncles, took the fatal brand from 
the chest where she had kept it (see
Meleager
) and threw it once more on the fire; 
as it was consumed, Meleager died on the spot, as the Fates had foretold. Thus 
Artemis achieved her revenge against King Oeneus.

During the hunt, Peleus
accidentally killed his host Eurytion. 
In the course of the hunt and its aftermath, many of the hunters turned upon one 
another, contesting the spoils, and so the Goddess continued to be revenged (Kerenyi, 
114): “But the goddess again made a great stir of anger and crying battle, over 
the head of the boar and the bristling boar’s hide, between
Kouretes
and the high-hearted
Aitolians
” (Homer,
Iliad
, ix.543).

The boar’s hide that was preserved in the Temple of
Athena Alae
at
Tegea
in
Laconia
was reputedly that of the Calydonian 
Boar, “rotted by age and by now altogether without bristles” by the time
Pausanias
saw it in the second century CE. He 
noted that the tusks had been taken to Rome as booty from the defeated allies of
Mark Anthony
by
Augustus
; “one of the tusks of the Calydonian 
boar has been broken”, Pausanias reports, “but the remaining one, having a 
circumference of about half a fathom, was dedicated in the Emperor’s gardens, in 
a shrine of Dionysos”. The Calydonian Hunt was the theme of the temple’s main 
pediment.

Arpi (Argyrippa or Argos Hippium) was an ancient city of
Apulia
,
Italy
, 20 mi. W. of the sea coast, and 5 mi. N. 
of the modern Foggia
. The legend attributes its foundation to
Diomedes
, and the figure of a horse, which 
appears on its coins, shows the importance of horse-breeding in early times in 
the district. Its territory extended to the sea, and
Strabo
says that from the extent of the city 
walls one could gather that it had once been one of the greatest cities of
Italy
. As a protection against the
Samnites
, Arpi became an ally of

Rome. In the war with
Pyrrhus
, the Arpani aided Rome with a 
contingent of 4000 foot and 400 horse. Arpi remained faithful to Rome until 
Rome’s defeat at the
battle of Cannae
, but the consul Quintus Fabius 
Maximus, son of the famous Roman dictator
Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus
, captured it 
in 213 B.C., and it never recovered its former importance. It lay on a by-road 
from Luceria
to
Sipontum
. No Roman inscriptions have, indeed, 
been found here, and remains of antiquity are scanty. Foggia is its medieval 
representative.