Turtle Versus Owl
Rivalry and Coinage in Aegina and Athens By David S. Michaels The volcanic island of Aegina sits in the Saronic Gulf off the coast of Attica, only 17 miles from the city of Athens. Though neighbors, these two great ancient cities were not friends – rather the opposite. From earliest recorded times, their peoples detested one another and competed vigorously, sometimes violently, for the trade that was so important to the ancient Greek economy. This nasty rivalry can be followed in their coinage of the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Aegina was supposedly named for a river nymph who, like so many others, was seduced by Zeus and gave birth to a hero named Aiakos, the island’s first king. While it possessed some good arable land suitable for grain, olives and figs, Aegina was mostly mountainous and, Figure 1: Aegina from the sea. blessed with two fine harbors, Photo by Nickthestoned, courtesy Wikipedia.org. ideally positioned for maritime trade. The seafaring Minoans placed a colony there that left behind a fabulous treasure of gold, dated to circa 1700 BC, found on the island in 1891. The Minoans were followed by Mycenaean and Doric settlers, the latter from the coastal city of Epidauros, who arrived in the 800s BC. They built a walled city named after the island and, more importantly, a fleet that sailed all over the ancient Aegean, establishing trading outposts in Egypt and Asia Minor, and funneling wealth back to the mother island, which was soon suitably embellished with temples dedicated to Aphrodite, Apollo and Dionysos. At some point in the later 600s BC, Aegina broke away from the control of Epidauros, and during that revolt a group of Aeginetan sailors made off with a pair of sacred wooden cult images that Epidauros had originally gifted to Athens. It is a typically convoluted archaic tale too long to recount in detail here, but the upshot was that Athens demanded them back, Aegina refused, and thence commenced the feud between the two communities. Athenians took to referring to Aegina, easily visible from its port, as “the eyesore of the Piraeus.” Of course, the real source of enmity was competition over trade routes and material wealth, which was greatly magnified by something the Aeginetans were the first to introduce to Europe: coined money. During their travels, Aegina’s merchants were exposed to the newly invented coins used by the Lydians and Ionians and took note of how they made transactions much easier. Although she had no native electrum or gold, Aegina had access to productive silver mines on the nearby island of Siphnos and so began to produce her own coins circa 550 BC. These early silver staters depicted on their obverses a sea turtle (emblematic of their marine interests, and perhaps a visual play on the island’s humped4
Figure 2: Early Aegina “Turtle” Stater c. 550 BC, with smooth shell and “proto Union Jack” incuse. (CNG 76, Lot 504)