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Auction: 325 - Ancient Coins: The Squires Collection and The Mendon Collection
Lot: 8

Sicily. Syracuse. Thoinon and Sosistratos, 278 BC. AV 60 Litrae - Dekadrachm. 4.22 gms. ΣYPAKoΣIΩNN, grain-wreathed head of Kore-Persephone left, wearing pendant earring and pearl necklace, bee behind, rev. Nike in biga galloping right, earring (sometimes described as a moon) above, Θ below horse’s foreleg; the name EПI IKETA has been erased from the die in the exergue. Buttrey Morgantina 5-R, SNG Klagenfurt 523, SNG Munich 1292, Egger 26.11.09.271 (this coin?). Very rare. During the violent power struggles and turbulence in Sicily following Maenon’s assassination of Agathokles, the people of Syracuse appointed Hiketas their general and protector. For nine years he ruled as tyrant, but in 278 BC at the river Terias, he suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the Carthaginians. As a result, he was expelled from Syracuse by Thoinon, one of his officers. Thoinon, though, was soon after attacked by Sosistratos, a tyrant of Akragas and the city teetered on civil war. But when Carthaginian forces fresh from seizing Akragas besieged Syracuse, Thoinon and Sosistratos entered a truce while sending a plea for aid to the Epirote Pyrrhos. After landing his army in Sicily, Pyrrhos lifted the siege. To prevent further strife there, he had Thoinon executed and forced Sosistratos to flee. Before Pyrrhos arrived, Thoinon faced with civil war and foreign invasion, would likely have had no time to produce new coin dies. Thus the dies prepared for Hiketas were used, with his name hastily effaced from the reverse – as in the above example. Some evidence of reverse die rust. Good Very Fine.

Ex CNG Sale 46, June 24, 1998, lot 46

Sold for
$5,000

Sale 325 Notices
Additional Provenance: Ex Giessener Munzhandlung Dieter Gorny GmbH, Auction number: 81, Munich (Germany), 03.03.1997, Lot 145. the Syracuse 60 Litrae has a typo in the provenance, it is not lot 46 from CNG Sale 46, but rather Lot 116.