into the mountain, and corresponding so well with the typical representation upon the coins of Cnossus as to lead us to suspect, with Colonel Leake, that there may have been once something of the same kind at Cnossus, but larger perhaps, and, as having been the reputed work of Dædalus, more artificial.* No less remarkable are the two representations which we have, upon two very rare coins, of the Acropolis of Athens: one of the coins being in the British Museum and the other in the Imperial Collection at Paris. The Parthenon, of course, forms a prominent object in each of these views; the one being taken from the north, and the other from the southeast. On the foreground of one we have the great Dionysiac theatre, with its proscenium and cavea,-the gradation of seats, -and even the cunei or separations formed by the radiating steps which led upwards from the Orchestra. Over the centre of the theatre is a grotto mentioned by Pausanias, exactly as it appeared to Stuart the traveller, in the last century. In the view upon the other coin we have the cavern sacred to Apollo and Pant, with the flight of steps leading down from the Acropolis to the fountain Clepsydra. The Propylæa as well as the Parthenon are visible in both of these views, but the colossal statue of Minerva Promachus only in the latter. If our space would allow, something might be said upon the representation of legendary exploits; such, for instance, as the A * This labyrinth was visited by Tournefort in the year 1700. plan of it by Mr. Cockerell may be found in Walpole's Collection, vol. ii. p. 405. + Pan was associated with Apollo in acknowledgment of his aid at the battle of Marathon, and a statue was erected to him by Miltiades, upon which Simonides wrote the following distich: Τὸν τραγόπουν ἐμε Πᾶνα τὸν Αρκάδα, τὸν κατὰ Μήδων A statue which, as Colonel Leake observes in his Topography of Athens, may possibly be the identical figure thus dedicated by Miltiades, being of a style of art corresponding to his time, and having been discovered in a garden close by this cavern, is now deposited under what Böckh calls the scala Bibliothecæ publicæ' at Cambridge. Truly we may say and without irreverence, that 'Great Pan' is not only 'dead,' but buried. We hope, however, to see the time when all Dr. Clarke's marbles,-together with the Greek inscriptions more recently presented to the University by Captain Spratt, and published with scholar-like notes from the ready pen of Mr. Churchill Babington, shall find their legitimate position within the walls of the Fitzwilliam Museum. We understand that the cabinets of coins belonging to the University have already been removed thither. contest of Theseus with the bull of Marathon,-the two young men of Catana carrying away their aged parents during an eruption of Etna,- Diomed stealthily abstracting the Palladium,—and Hermes rescuing the infant Arcas, the device upon a very beautiful but very costly coin of the city of Pheneus in Arcadia. Nor ought we to omit the actual portraits of monarchs who have been famed in history, many of which are in a high style of art, and preserve the likeness through a long series with undoubted accuracy. This remark will apply more particularly to Alexander and his kingly generals. In the series of the Ptolemies, we see in striking contrast the energetic and resolute countenance of the first of that race, the patron of learning and the provident father of his subjects, with the unmeaning physiognomy of some of his vicicus and enervated successors. Not less remarkable are the elaborate portraits of the last two kings. of Macedonia, Philip V. and Perseus, who are mournfully associated with our recollection of the triumph of Roman arms at Cynoscephala and Pydna. The portraits of Mithridates king of Pontus are marked with all the characteristic fire and energy of the monarch who waged a war of twenty-five years' duration with Rome in the zenith of her power. The numismatist traces a connexion, often mutually illustrative, between the devices upon Greek coins and the extant literature of Greece.-According to Eschylus, the omen which appeared to the two Atride when setting out for Troy, was the appearance of two eagles holding in their talons a hare. This identical device appears upon a coin of Agrigentum. Was there any connexion between the two? When it is remembered that Eschylus resided for some time in the Sicilian court of king Hiero, previously to his writing this tragedy, and at a period when this Agrigentine money must have been current throughout Sicily, we shall see that there was some such connexion.f -On the reverse of the same coin, we have the monster Scylla corresponding so precisely with Virgil's description 'Prima hominum facies, et pulchro pectore virgo. that, as Colonel Leake remarks, the poet must have had before him some work similar to this beautiful coin when he wrote the Agamemnon, 1. 115. It is at least a remarkable coincidence that the same device was found by Mr. Layard in the ornamental work upon a bronze plate at Nineveh. lines. In Virgil's description of the shield of Eneas certain 'Et circum argento clari delphines in orbem in regard to which dolphins the poet is condemned by Heyne Unmistakeable allusion is made to various personages who have been immortalised by the writings of Homer. The fountains of Messeis and Hypereia, from which, according to the sad forebodings of her husband, the captive Andromache would be doomed to carry water, are represented upon the Thessalian coins of Phere and Larissa; and on the latter we have the captive princess herself, habited in a long transparent garment, and filling her vase at a stream of water flowing from a lion's mouth. A female head, adorned with the peculiar and complicated headdress which Andromache is represented as tearing off when she received the tidings of her husband's death, appears upon a coin of Thebe in Troas, of which place her father was the king. The Græco-Asiatic tetradrachms called cistophori' formed at one period a considerable portion of the circulating medium in the commerce of Greece and Asia Minor, owing probably to their purity of silver and uniformity of weight. Nearly a million of them were exhibited at Rome in the celebration of triumphs, within the short period of three years. Cicero on returning home from his province, left a considerable sum 'in 'cistophoro' in the hands of the Publicani at Ephesus, which seem to have fallen into the hands of Pompey and his marauders, instead of being exchanged for Roman money, and appropriated to the payment of his debts, as he had feelingly suggested in a letter to Atticus. It is a fact well known to some Oriental numismatists, that www the Persians of medieval times, in order to give currency through their dominions to foreign money, were accustomed to make an incision with a sharp instrument extending from the edge of the coin towards the centre. This incision, which is still found upon the old Mahometan money of India, is known in the East as the Shroff's mark.' A similar indentation is found upon some of the coins of Greece; and Colonel Leake, being aware of the Persian practice in the middle ages, and observing that the mark occurs upon the coins of Greek cities which were in the possession of the Persians at the time, or after the time, at which the coins appear, from their style, to have been struck, and upon none other, suggests the strong probability, amounting as we think almost to certainty, that it is a countermark affixed by Persian authority at a much earlier period. It is found upon coins of Cilicia, of Macedonia and Thrace, of Barca in Africa, and of Athens. Haying to act upon coins much more solid than the gold coins of India, it was proportionably much more wide and deep. On one of those extremely rare coins the Athenian decadrachma, in the British Museum, the barbarous officer of Xerxes has forced his indentation quite through the silver; so rudely indeed, that the eye of the patron goddess has had, literally, a hair-breadth escape. The beautiful coins of some of the provinces of Asia Minor prove, as Colonel Leake observes, that although the inhabitants. of those provinces were styled by Arrian Búpßapot, they were barbarians no further than in regard to their non-Hellenic language; and that they were barbarians in this sense we may infer from the legends of the coins themselves. We find indeed the characters of the Greek alphabet, and sometimes, as in the case of the coins of Aspendus in Pamphylia, — without any admixture of other characters: but the words which they express bear little or no resemblance to Greek words, and in many cases the characters are intermixed with others which were foreign to the eye of an Athenian, as the sounds which they were invented to express were doubtless foreign to his ear. The Lycians seem to have had many of these sounds, and the Pamphylians few. This intermixture of the Greek and barbarian elements is strikingly alluded to by St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles:-he represents the people of Lystra as worshipping the Greek deities, Jupiter and Mercury; but when they spoke to one another, it was AUKаOVIOTI. To speak the languages of Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, was *Acts, xiv. 11. included in the gift of tongues on the day of Pentecost. In some parts of Asia the Phoenician alphabet was used: Colonel Leake mentions this in his description of a coin of the city of Tarsus, bearing the device of the Jupiter Tarsius, or Baal-Tars, as it is clearly expressed in the Phoenician legend. Upon this class of coins Colonel Leake has said but little, probably because the subject has been so ably and so thoroughly treated by the Duc de Luynes, as to render any further inquiry superfluous. With much confidence we would refer such of our readers as feel interested in the subject to the learned treatises of that distinguished numismatist,-'Sur la Numismatique des Satrapies 'et de la Phoenicie,' and 'La Numismatique et Inscriptions "Cypriotes.' Finding a class of coins, apparently Græco-Asiatic, with Phoenician legends, expressive, as he thinks, of the names of Tiribazus, Pharnabazus, Syennesis, Dernes, Gaos, and other Persian satraps of the maritime parts of Asia Minor, under the Achæmenid kings, M. de Luynes supposes that these Persian noblemen, having a Phoenician navy in their employ, employed also the Phoenician mode of writing upon their coins. Whatever brings us near to Phoenicia possesses a peculiar interest from its contiguity to Palestine, and we examine with no small degree of curiosity the Duke's remarks upon the kings of Phoenicia and their coins. He lays before us an engraved gem from the cabinet at Florence, and he traces upon it the name of Abibal, the father of Hiram, king of Tyre, a contemporary with David. Upon most of the Duke's Phoenician coins we find a reiteration of that mysterious device, a lion devouring a stag,-which, with the variation of a bull in the place of a stag, is so common upon the coins bearing Phoenician legends, and recalls to our recollection several passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, in which the lion is represented as 'treading down and tearing in pieces,'-as tearing in pieces enough for his whelps, and 'strangling for his lionesses, filling his holes with prey and his dens with ravin.' Neither upon these, however, nor upon the Lycian coins and characters which have been investigated with so much ability by Sir Charles Fellowes, have we space to enlarge. The constant recurrence of the device of the triskelium upon Lycian coins is quite as mysterious as the lion and the bull upon those Phoenician coins which we have just been alluding to. The intelligent numismatist, or indeed any person who takes an interest in the study of coins, will be desirous to know something about the places of their disinterment, the locality in * Micah, v. 8.; Nahum, ii. 11. |