'Myth and coinage' in Athens

Americans put presidents on our coins. The Greeks put gods on theirs. Therein may lie a significant distinction between Periclean Athens and present-day Washington, D.C.

Our coins do proclaim, "In God We Trust." The Greeks, on the other hand, knew that their gods were never trustworthy. To them, faith and trust had nothing to do with divinity. In this respect, too, the Greeks demonstrated their superior wisdom.

Of course, we don't use coins much any more, or even paper currency, which must have seemed such a comedown in its day. Instead we use pieces of plastic, stamped not with politicians' faces but corporate logos, and bearing a two-year expiration date.

Somehow, I don't think they'll ever be displayed in a museum exhibition.

To the ancients, coins were talismanic as well as practical; that is to say, they were associated with something greater than their face value. This something was luck and its cousin, efficacy.

To carry a coin with the image of Aphrodite might not make you luckier in love or better in bed. To take Poseidon with you on a sea voyage might not avert shipwreck. It couldn't hurt, though. And if the gods couldn't be trusted, that was all the more reason to cultivate their good will. They had power.

Medallions' purchasing power

Some religiously inclined people carry saints' medallions today for similar reasons. But you can't buy groceries with medallions. Money still serves that function, but— although duly worshipped in modern society— it possesses no power beyond commercial exchange (and even that is a wasting asset). The only thing I can say with certainty about the dollar bill in my wallet is that, the image of our first president notwithstanding, it will be worth a little less tomorrow than it was today.

Yet old coins still wield some of their old talismanic power, if only because they're the only objects capable of surviving for millennia more or less unscathed. They're impressive because human hands long gone once held them, used them, wagered them, and perhaps prayed to them.

They're also impressive as the smallest units of technology in vanished civilizations. Their careful shaping and stamping testifies to their multiple significations. No object at once so small and yet so ubiquitous carries as much information— economic, political, aesthetic and religious. When I see my fellow 21st Century citizens rubbing their smart phones as if they were runic tablets, what I see is nostalgia for the obol and the drachma. But those glory days will not return.

Small miracles

Tucked into a corner of Athens' great Archaeological Museum this summer and fall is an exhibit entitled "Myth and Coinage." The exhibition is arranged by the god or goddess whose likeness appears on the coins: Zeus, the chief of the Olympic pantheon; Hera, his always-jealous and sometimes vindictive consort; Dionysos, he of the long locks and the intoxicating grape; Hermes the handsome and Aphrodite the beautiful; Ares and Hephaistos; Apollo and Artemis; Demeter and Poseidon; and, among the unlovely, Hecate, Medusa, and Pan.

They're most frequently portrayed with their attributes: Apollo on his sun chariot or Poseidon with his trident, standing for the activities they represent and the luck it's hoped they will bring. Sometimes they're depicted in the mythological scenes with which they're associated; many of these representations are small miracles of detail.

Beside the exhibition cases for most deities stands a colossal sculpted head from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The contrast between the giant heads and the tiny coins is, obviously, dramatic in its effect.

The bigger, the emptier

It illustrates too the law of diminishing returns in graven images. The colossi— detached, to be sure, from their original statues and sites of worship— suggest not more but less power; that is to say, not more but less belief. Shall we say that the bigger the image, the emptier the vessel?

That is perhaps too sweeping a generalization. But it's true that the smaller and more intimate the representation, the more individual the implied relationship between the gods and their petitioners. It's the difference, say, between a personal icon and one in a church.

Of course, coins exist not to keep but to spend. For the ancients, therefore, a coin functioned, in its religious aspect, as a shared communal token. When you gave someone a coin to make a purchase or pay a debt, you passed on whatever power or luck was imputed to the particular divinity portrayed on it.

(In the case of a Medusa or Hecate coin, it might be a charm against rather than for something— for example, to ward off bad luck. A modern coin designed to perform the same function might carry the likeness of, say, Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry.)

Gods vs. men

As the frontiers of ancient Greece widened with Alexander the Great, gods of foreign provenance appeared. Alexander himself, worshipped as a god in Asia (to the scandal of the Greeks), was represented on many coins. This practice appears to have been partly responsible at least for ushering in a new fashion: the depiction of heroes as well as deities.

Heracles, semi-divine himself, was a popular figure, performing his 12 labors; so were Achilles, Perseus and (locally, in Crete) Theseus, the slayer of the Minotaur. An interesting Cretan coin depicted the labyrinth itself, an early example of the craze for mazes that crops up again and again in the ancient world. There was a Judgment of Paris, the world's first recorded beauty contest.

Thumbs-down to politicians

But mere personalities on coins were a rarity, at least before Hellenistic times, but an image of Homer does pop up here. Portrait statues would come into vogue in the latter Fifth Century B.C.E., but it would doubtless have struck the Greeks as an utter breach of taste to put their politicians on coins. When you really ran out of ideas, you could always show a river-god or a few nymphs dancing to Pan's flutes.

The provenance of the coins themselves indicates the great sweep of Hellenistic civilization, from Malaga in Spain to Telephus in India. Present-day Greece is a smaller affair. It might have seemed a touch ironic, too, to mount a display of ancient coinage in the midst of an acute financial crisis such as the Greeks have confronted lately. But maybe it's salutary to remind people that the drachma was around much longer than the euro, and— who knows?— may be again.