Eion: A Watery Place
- sulla80
- Jun 9, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 14
"Better one sparrow in thy hand than a thousand on the wing"
- Proverbs of Ahikar the Wise, 6th Century Assyria, #51
Image Source: Noodle snacks, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Place
Eion sits where the Strymon River empties into the Aegean - at the intersection of fresh and salt water, marsh and shoreline. The name itself signals this: Eion translates from Greek simply as a watery place (shoreline, bank, coast). Its position at the river mouth made it a natural waypoint for the timber and silver moving out of the Thracian interior.
The archaeologist D. Hereward, writing in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1963, captured the ambiguity of the physical remains:
“The ruins that we now see at the mouth of the Strymon are Byzantine, with a milestone of Caracallus in the Agora. Northwest of the city is a marshy lake which may or may not have been there in antiquity. To the north the land rises as one approaches the main road, to the southwest is a tongue of firm land descending to the ruins of a wooden bridge. On each side of the tongue the land is flat and sometimes flooded. Timbers, perhaps from ships, have been found in a well on the edge of the tongue...”
-Hereward, D. (1963). Inscriptions from Thrace. American Journal of Archaeology, 67(1), 71-75.A marshy lake that may or may not have been there in antiquity: the uncertainty feels appropriate for Eion, a city that existed at a junction - of river and sea, and of Greek and Thracian worlds. In personal correspondence, Prof. Bubelis notes the Strymon had no delta to speak of until the Byzantine period, meaning Eion sat right where river met sea - not set back behind marshland as the modern landscape might suggest.
The Coins and Their Birds
Thraco-Macedonian material from the Strymon watershed is united by its imagery: waterfowl. Ducks, geese, herons, cranes — the birds of the marsh and the river mouth appear consistently across coins that scholars believe emanate from the same mint as the epigraphic (lettered) coins of Eion. The iconography is not decorative whimsy; it is topography made portable in silver.
A handful of outliers complicate the picture. A few coins have surfaced with non-waterfowl - an eagle on a heavy coin of 4.80g, and another with what is often misidentified as a goose but is almost certainly a partridge. These are consistent in fabric and style with the broader Eion group, yet they stand apart from both the anepigraphic early coinage and the later lizard-bearing types. Perhaps Eion minted for neighbors. Perhaps the mint's engravers occasionally ranged beyond the marsh. For now these coins remain intriguing anomalies.
Two Standards
The coinage of Eion divides cleanly into two chronological phases, each with its own weight standard and character.
Early coinage (c. 525 BC onward) was produced sporadically, on the Aeginetan weight standard - the standard of Andros, Eion's metropolis. These coins are rarer, more varied in style, and carry no letters or symbols.
Later coinage (c. 477 BC onward) shifted to a lower standard, either Attic-Euboic or the Persian siglos. This later phase is notable for its sheer volume and uniformity: the same type repeated at scale, differentiated only by the addition of a letter (a magistrate's name? a source of silver? a destination?) or an occasional symbol such as an ivy leaf.
The letters on these later coins do not constitute an ethnic. As with similar coinage of the period, they most plausibly represent magistrates' names, silver sources, production batches, or other administrative information now lost to us.
Two Coins
The Early Coin: A Goose with a Ring. I'm not usually drawn to tiny coins, but this one pulled me in. The weight places it firmly among the early Aeginetan-standard material - a more unusual piece than the abundant later coinage. The ring to the upper left is the distinguishing feature: SNG ANS 271 doesn't note it, and only three examples with two rings appear in ACSearch (suggesting a second ring may sometimes fall off flan). The flan is a sturdy little nugget, and the surface shows a fine, even crystallization pattern that I find genuinely attractive.
Macedon, Eion, c. 480-470 BC, AR Triobol, 1.11g, 9.4mm
Obv: Goose standing right, head left; small ring to upper left
Rev: Incuse square
Ref: AMNG III/2, –; SNG ANS 271 corr. (ring not noted); three examples with 2 rings in
Looking at other similar coins, a second ring could be off flan to left e.g. ACSearch.
At some point close to Eion's capture by Kimon and the Athenians in 477/6 it had switched to producing a huge volume of coins on the lower standard and all with the same style and type, merely differing as to the addition of a letter or a symbol (such as an ivy leaf).
Three Later Coins: Lizard and Theta. These represent the high-volume later coinage. The lizard, the hallmark of this series, is mostly off flan on the first coin; the theta presumably marks a magistrate or batch. These coins were minted in the shadow of one of the more dramatic episodes of the early 5th century.
Eion was taken from the Persians by Kimon, Athenian general, for the Delian League. The Persian commander Boges, offered terms that would have permitted safe withdrawal, refused rather than appear a coward before Xerxes. As Herodotus records (Hist. 7.107), when provisions ran out he built a pyre, killed his household, threw Eion's treasure into the Strymon, and immolated himself. Kimon's victory was commemorated in Athens with three stone herms whose inscriptions Plutarch preserves (Cim. 7.4–5).
The city's strategic importance outlasted the Persian war. Thucydides, serving as an Athenian general, held Eion against the Spartan Brasidas in 424 BC (Thuc. 4.106.3–4) - saving the port while losing Amphipolis three miles upriver, a failure for which Athens exiled him for twenty years. He notes that the whole region was prized for its shipbuilding timber and the revenue from nearby silver mines (Thuc. 4.108.1).
Macedon, Eion, AR Trihemiobol (1.01g, 11mm), circa 460-400 BC.
Obv: Goose standing to right, head to left; lizard to left above (off flan), Θ in lower left field
Rev: Quadripartite incuse square
Ref: Naumann 38, 126; Künker 71, 164; HGC 3.1, 521.
A third piece for comparison:
Was the Mint Really Eion?
Gaebler hesitated to name Eion as the mint ("The coins thought to have been minted in Eion")– and this has been revisited periodically since then. There is a weight of evidence consistent with Eion and its history:
Eion translates from Greek to a watery place (shoreline, bank, coast…)
The physical site, where the Strymon met the Aegean, was ideal for trade and transit - a reasonable context for a civic mint.
Among Thraco-Macedonian coinages that cannot be definitively assigned to a major polis or tribal group, this material is both abundant and spans a long duration
Eion minted electrum and silver in a variety of denominations across several distinct styles, all of which points to production of a civic mint of long duration and episodic productivity
No single argument is decisive, but together they form a coherent picture.
References
Consulted:
Hugo Gaebler, Die Antiken Münzen Nord-Griechenlands (Makedonia and Paionia), Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin
Barclay Head & Reginald S. Poole, BMC Greek (Macedonia)
Katerini Liampi, Argilos: A Historical and Numismatic Study (Athens, 2005)
Ernest Babelon, Traité Des Monnaies Grecques Et Romaines I (Troisième partie), 1907
D. Hereward, "Inscriptions from Thrace," American Journal of Archaeology 67.1 (1963), 71–75
Personal correspondence with Prof. W. Bubelis, Curator, John Max Wulfing Collection of Ancient Coins and Related Objects
Not yet consulted:
A. J. Tzamalis, multi-part series "Uncertain Thraco-Macedonian Coins," Nomismatika Khronika 16–18 (1997–1999)
SNG volumes: ANS (Macedon); Fitzwilliam; Delepierre; Copenhagen
Catalog of the McClean Collection
Asterios Tsintsifios, Perix Pangaion Epeiros (good photographs; otherwise unreliable)
These notes were first created 14-Nov-2020 and updated with additional coins and sources on 9-Jun-2024 and 12-Apr-2026.
Comments