1The bronze coinage of Attic Salamis must be one of the most anomalous coinages in the Greek corpus. As numerous finds attest, the coins circulated widely in and around Attica during the fourth century BC1. Since the island of Salamis was a part of the Athenian state, its coins ought to have been in some sense Athenian. Yet there is nothing conventionally Athenian about them. Obverses bear the head of the eponymous nymph Salamis2, reverses the legend ΣΑ-ΛΑ on either side of the cut-out shield and superimposed sheathed sword of Ajax. The initial specimens were large − 16-19 mm, 3-4 g − close in diameter and weight to the initial coins with Eleusinian types and the legend ΕΛΕΥΣΙ that from the 350s were minted to supply a small denomination currency for the annual crowds at the Eleusinian festival3. Barclay Head suggested that the Salamis bronze may likewise have been an Attic festival coinage, issued in connection with the festival of the Salaminian hero Ajax, the Aianteia4. But this was never more than a very minor festival and is not even attested prior to the second century BC when it is mentioned as the occasion for displays of the Athenian ephebeia5. Other scholars conjectured that the coinage ought to have belonged to a brief period beginning in 317 when Salamis became independent of Athens6. But the excavation of two specimens from the remains of houses at Olynthus has shown that that the introduction of the coinage must have antedated the destruction of Olynthus in 3487. Some diminution of the coins’ size over time and late, minor alterations of the obverse and reverse designs make it clear furthermore that that minting continued over a relatively protracted period.

2Circulating specimens show up in archaeological contexts as late as the end of the fourth century and as early as the beginning of that century, at least according to the information available to me in the 1980s when I was preparing Agora 26. The three earliest contexts I was able to cite were 1) an earth layer from the Agora Excavations containing a Salamis coin and pottery sherds of the fifth century but with one fragment of a “small coarse saucer with black glaze” that was thought to be “probably early fourth”; 2) an Agora fill with a Salamis coin and a few sherds of the late fifth century; and 3) the report of a grave excavated in the Kerameikos in the 1960s that included a Salamis coin and was said to date to 400-395 BC8. The report came from an unpublished lecture of the mid 1960s by Prof. Peter Franke, to whom I later wrote for more details. In reply he sent me a copy of his lecture and a xeroxed photo of a cast of the coin before it had been cleaned but regretted that he had been unable to obtain further details about the burial9.

3Only recently have I learned from the excavator, Prof. Klaus Vierneisel, that this reported dating is mistaken and that the grave in all probability is actually a burial of the 420s BC. In view of its great importance, I here summarize the detailed account that Prof. Vierneisel generously provided (per litt., 6 March 2006) and which he will present more formally in the final publication of his cemetery excavations.

4The burial, HS (Heilige Strasse) 12, was the burial of a child in a terracotta tub that was made of two rectangular larnakes, one placed over the other as a lid. Since the skeleton had mostly disintegrated, it was not possible to determine the original position of the coin in relation to the body. Nor was there any chance of dating the burial through its contents since, aside from the coin (fig. 1)10, the only other gift placed in the casket was a mussel shell. Nevertheless HS 12 lay at the left limit of an approximately ten meter long area in which, towards right, were clustered a remarkable number of about fifteen children’s burials in various sized tubs, all at the same level, many of them with grave goods that date roughly between 430 and 420 BC. As one can see from Vierneisel’s plan (fig. 2)11, HS 12 is located undeniably apart and with a different orientation from this closely grouped mass of burials, but it is at the same level and there are no indications in the stratigraphy or otherwise that it might be a later burial of the fourth century. Such evidence that there is thus associates HS 12 with the rest of the buried children, who, as Dr. Vierneisel noted in his letter, may very well have been victims of the great plague that struck Athens in 430 and 429 BC.

Fig. 1. Salamis coin from Kerameikos Grave HS 12.

Fig. 2. Plan of burials on north side of the Sacred Way.

5Needless to say, if there were any proof that the coin must belong to the fourth century, grave HS 12 would have to be disassociated from these burials and dated later. But what is so intriguing here is that, on the contrary, recently published evidence pertaining to the discovery of another Salamis coin in another Kerameikos excavation supports Vierneisel’s deduction that burial HS 12 was in fact a burial of the 420s. This other excavation is Dr. Ursula Knigge’s excavation of Building Z, a two-story private house constructed around 430 BC immediately inside the city wall where the wall joins the Sacred Gate12. After about a decade or less the house was destroyed by an earthquake, probably, according to Dr. Knigge, the earthquake of 420 BC that Thucydides (4.45) mentions as breaking up a meeting of the Athenian Assembly.13 A badly corroded coin of Salamis was found in the ruins of one of the rooms of this house, recorded as apparently lying on the floor of Room F under the thick fall of destroyed mud-bricks. In Dr. Knigge’s publication of the excavation, however, both the identification of the coin and its probable findspot are described cautiously as less than certain14. But I have seen the coin and can vouch for the identification: although hardly any of the original bronze surface survived corrosion, one can still make out the oval rim of the Ajax shield with its unmistakable border of three raised parallel lines. Granted that there can be no certainty that the coin was resting on the floor, it is essential to remember that if the coin comes from any part at all of the first construction of the house (Building Z1) – or even from its immediate reconstruction (Building Z2), which was destroyed by fire at the end of the fifth century15 – the burial of the coin will still have occurred, if not in the 420s, then at least before the end of the fifth century. Another consideration is that the excavator’s caution about the exact position of discovery may have been influenced in part by her awareness that the Salaminian coinage was believed to be a coinage of the fourth century, so that any specimen of it in a destruction context of c. 420 would have to be regarded as inexplicably intrusive.

6Neither of the two early Kerameikos contexts for a Salaminian bronze can be said to be chronologically decisive by itself. The child burial HS 12 is dated inferentially by its similarity and proximity to a cluster of other children’s burials of the 420s, whereas the findspot of the Building Z1 coin, although it was probably recovered from the floor beneath the destruction debris of c. 420 or a few years earlier, was not perfectly secure. When taken together, however, the chronological implications of both finds converge, strongly reinforcing one another and mutually indicating that the coinage itself ought to have commenced before the 420s, probably, one would imagine, at some point in the 430s.

7If this is so (and I am unaware of any reason why it should not be), the coinage of Salamis would be probably the earliest bronze coinage in Aegean Greece − although not of course in the broader Hellenic world. Bronze coinage had been developing in Sicily and Magna Grecia from around the middle of the fifth century. The earliest Sicilian bronze is believed to date shortly before the mid century. In Southern Italy the cities of Thurium and Rhegium began to issue fiduciary coins in bronze around 440 and were joined by five other South Italian poleis in the last quarter of the century16. In discussions of the subsequent spread of bronze coinage eastwards, scholars have frequently remarked on a probable link between the earlier of these South Italian coinages and a notable Athenian, the orator and poet Dionysios who was famously nicknamed ho Chalkous, for his advocacy of bronze coinage (Ath. 15.669 D). In some sources he is included among leaders of the Athenian colonizing expedition to Thurium in 443 BC (Plut., Nic., 5.2; Photios, s.v., Θουριομάντεις). According to the usual reconstruction, Dionysios gained his enthusiasm for bronze coinage during his travels in the West but upon returning home was unable to stir up any interest among his fellow Athenians, who, proudly committed to their traditional coinage of silver, did not begin to strike a regular coinage in bronze until well along in the fourth century17. Could it be, though, that Dionysios, or someone else who shared his obsession about the advantages of small denomination coins in bronze, after failing to persuade the people of Athens, turned for support elsewhere, such as to the people of Salamis?

8As learned from inscriptions, the corporate body of the Salaminians was known as the “demos of the Athenians on Salamis” or simply the “demos of the Salaminioi”18. It had its own archon, whose responsibilities included management of the local festival of Dionysos and judicial issues involving land ownership. Its membership consisted of the Athenian residents of the island, and although all of them were officially registered in Cleisthenic demes of the Attic mainland, they nevertheless enjoyed a second, less formal identity as Salaminians. In modern scholarship this demos has commonly been classified as an Athenian cleruchy, but as Martha Taylor has explained, there are several reasons for questioning this label19. In her book, subtitled The History of an Unofficial Athenian Demos, she argues that the demos of the Salaminians was rather a unique political entity within the polis of Athens: “an anomalous citizen community that was a focus of identity for residents of the island − not a constitutional deme, but . . . a demos and so a real community”20. As she shows, Salamis was sometimes regarded as being different or separate from the rest of Attica. An island, it was physically separated from mainland Attica by water, and certain religious taboos of mainland Attica did not apply there21. The fact that the island community minted a bronze coinage is one further instance of its idiosyncratic and slightly detached status within the Athenian state.

9Citing the Eleusinian bronze coins that were struck in a central Athenian mint alongside regular Athenian ΑΘΕ bronze coins with owl types, Taylor suggested that the Athenian state was responsible for minting the Salaminian bronze as well22. But the Eleusinian analogy is less relevant than she realized and is hard to press in light of the new evidence that the Salamis bronze had commenced as early as the 430s23. A more plausible reconstruction is that influential individuals persuaded demos of Salamis to profit from minting itself a bronze coinage at least initially for use on the island and eventually, perhaps, wherever it might be accepted beyond. To judge from the module/value scale of later Attic bronze coins, the Salaminian pieces represented the quarter-obol or tetartemorion24, which happened to be the smallest denominational unit that the Athenian mint struck in silver in the fifth century25. Although we have no way of knowing whether these tiny 0.18 g silver fractions were circulating in satisfactory quantities or had become scarce, it is easy to understand the attraction of supplementing them with a larger and more practical bronze equivalent. Since bona fide Athenian coinage at this time was exclusively of silver, one wonders whether any Athenian would have objected to the demos of Salamis signing and producing a minor base-metal coinage ostensibly for local use. As the coins began to circulate informally on the Attic mainland, this too need not have provoked any official concern because of the extremely slight value of the money involved26. One can only speculate, but it is important to keep in mind that such questions concerning the authorization, production, and circulation of the Salamis bronze apply no matter when the coinage was introduced, whether, as was recently thought, in the early fourth century, or, as the Kerameikos finds now indicate, in the third quarter of the fifth century.

10This updating of the Salamis bronze might tempt some commentators to connect the coinage with the kollybos, a trivial unit of value mentioned in two passages of Old Comedy that date to the 420s: Eupolis’ Poleis (c. 422 BC, frag. 233 Koch) and Aristophanes’ Peace (421 BC, lines 1199-1201). As is clear from Theophrastus, Lap., 46, however, the kollybos was a weight corresponding to the eighth of an obol and so would not be strictly relevant to the Salamis coins if the denomination of the latter was the quarter-obol. As I argue elsewhere, the kollybos in these passages was a well-known value that, like the mina or the talent, was not represented in a coin, at least in the fifth century27. Nor, if the Salamis coins began in the 430s, can the possibility be entertained any longer that they might be the bronze coins mentioned in 405 BC in Aristophanes’ Frogs (lines 725-726) and subsequently in the Ekklesiazousai (lines 815-822) in the late 390s; for in the Frogs these ponera chalkia are described a having just been struck “yesterday”28. The Salamis coins clearly were a significant component of the small denomination currency of Attica during the later fifth and all of the fourth century, but everything we know and can deduce about about them must come from the surviving coins themselves, especially the few with recorded contexts of deposition29.