A Moment of Freedom

Kaunian rock tombs near Kaunos (today Dalyan, Türkiye), carved directly into the cliff face around 400 BCE, their façades resembling temples, overlook the Calbys River (today the Dalyan River).

The physical parameters of the coin (AR hemidrachm, 1.09 g) and its imagery: a helmeted head of Athena on the obverse; a short, sheathed sword, the city's ethnic, and a magistrate's name on the reverse, invite three immediate thoughts:

• It represents a self-governing Greek polis.

• It reflects an autonomous economic entity striking sovereign silver.

• The sheathed sword symbolizes a secured, lasting peace.

However, a more careful analysis tells a different story.

Kaunos and its setting

Kaunos lay at the mouth of the river Calbys, which served as the boundary between Caria and Lycia. Behind it rose the acropolis the ancients knew as Imbros; before it spread a closed harbour and the dockyards that made the town a working port. Strabo, writing a century and a half after the coin was struck, describes Kaunos:

"The city⁠ has dockyards, and a harbour that can be closed. Above the city, on a height, lies Imbrus, a stronghold. Although the country is fertile, the city is agreed by all to have foul air in the summer, as also in autumn, because of the heat and the abundance of fruits."
-Strabo, Geography XIV.2.3

The city exported dried figs, salt, salted fish, resin, and slaves - the staples of a coast that provisioned long voyages.

A fourth-century bilingual stele of the blue-grey marble common at Kaunos, unearthed in 1996. Eighteen lines of Carian are followed by eight lines of Greek, documenting that the city of Kaunos, under the magistrate Hipposthenes, voted to make two Athenians, Nikokles and Lysikles, official friends and benefactors of the city, along with their descendants, and granted them the usual privileges of that status. (see: Frei and Marek, 1997)

Kaunos, however, was not a Greek city but an indigenous Anatolian one, with its own language and script. Herodotus, who knew the city, could not decide whether its speech had shaped Carian or Carian had shaped it; the question stood unanswered for twenty-four centuries until the Greek-Carian bilingual decree, unearthed at Kaunos in 1996, confirmed the reading of Carian and placed it in the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European languages, beside Lycian and Lydian. The Athena is thus a Greek goddess on a non-Greek city's coin.

Herodotus also records two customs: that the Kaunians drank together - men, women, and children at once - and that they had once taken up their spears and driven the foreign gods from their territory.

From Rhodian subject to free city

During the wars of the Diadochi, Kaunos changed hands among Antigonos, Ptolemy, Demetrios, and Lysimachos, returning more than once to Ptolemaic control. It was purchased by Rhodes from the generals of Ptolemy for 200 talents. After Rome defeated Antiochos III, the Treaty of Apamea in 188 assigned Caria and Lycia south of the Maeander to Rhodes, and Kaunos was gain given to Rhodes as part of the Rhodian Peraia (mainland holdings).

Rhodian control was broken by the Third Macedonian War. Rome expected its allies to back it wholeheartedly against Perseus; Rhodes, a long-standing Roman ally and a major naval and commercial power, instead tried to position itself as a neutral broker. After the decisive Roman victory at Pydna (June 168), the Senate stripped Rhodes of Caria and Lycia, declared the two regions free, and made Delos a free port. Kaunos revolted against Rhodes. Polybius records the city in arms alongside Mylasa, with Rome behind the settlement that followed. The Roman decree of 167 BC made Kaunos autonomous. The hemidrachm belongs to the interval this freedom opened.

The freedom of 167 was conferred by Roman decree, not won by the city. And the coin was struck on the light Rhodian standard - the weight-system of the power Kaunos had just left. Coins issued on a Rhodian and Lycian silver standard served the market better than a separate standard. Ashton (1999) places these "Athena and sword" pieces from about 166 BC onward.

Reading the coin

Greek, Caria, Kaunos, magistrate Ktetos, AR Hemidrachm (1.09g, 13mm), c. 166-160 BCE.

Obv: Head of Athena right, wearing Corinthian helmet.

Rev: ΚΑΥ, magistrate ΚΤΗΤΟΣ, sword in sheath; spearhead to right.

Ref: Ashton, RBN CXLV (1999), 58b; Historia Numorum Online 286; cf. SNG von Aulock 2568; SNG Copenhagen 185; Asia Minor Coins 13761.

winged figure from earlier Kaunian coins

The obverse shows Athena in a crested helmet. Earlier Kaunian silver, struck in the fifth and fourth centuries, had carried a winged figure and, on the reverse, a conical sacred stone (a baetyl). The stone represented Basileus Kaunios, the city's chief god, whose aniconic form has been compared to the Lord-gods of the Semitic East; a limestone cone answering to it has been excavated near the harbour. The Hellenistic mint gave up the old god for Athena, an imported one.

The reverse carries the sword in its sheath, the ethnic - the letters K and AY - and a magistrate's name. Ashton places our magistrate, Ktetos (Κτητος), fifth in his relative chronology of six: Megistos (Μέγιστος) - Menippos (Μένιππος) - Eirenidas (Εἰρηνίδας) - Pharos (Φάρος) - Ktetos (Κτητος) - Antaios (Ἀνταῖος). He proposes that all six minted almost concurrently, over a short period after 166. The denomination is a hemidrachm of 1.09 grams on the light Rhodian standard.

Ashton's premise is that Rhodes would not have permitted a subject city to strike autonomous-type coins. The autonomous coinage therefore belongs to the window of freedom that opened in 167 and, as the history below shows, the cities freedom ends in 81.

Mithridates' massacre and the return to Rhodes

Appian describes Kaunos as a city made subject to Rhodes after the war with Antiochos and later freed by the Romans. In 129 BCE, the Romans formed the province of Asia, and Kaunos, near its southern edge, was assigned to Lycia. In 88 BCE, when Mithridates VI ordered the killing of every Roman and Italian in Asia, Kaunos complied. Appian names it among the participating cities.

"The Caunii, who had been made subject to Rhodes after the war against Antiochus and had been lately liberated by the Romans, pursued the Italians who had taken refuge about the statue of Vesta in the senate-house, tore them from the shrine, first killed the children before their mothers’ eyes, and then killed the mothers themselves and their husbands after them."
-Appian, Mithridatic Wars, III.23

The reckoning came in the settlement of the First Mithridatic War. By the massacre of 88, Kaunos forfeited the freedom it had held and the Senate, in 81, restored the city to Rhodes. Strabo states the outcome plainly, in the same chapter that describes the harbour: "The Kaunians once revolted from the Rhodians, but, by a decision of the Romans, they were received again by the Rhodians into favour" (Geography 14.2.3). The restoration was both a reward to Rhodes, which had stayed loyal and withstood Mithridates' siege, and a punishment of Kaunos.

Conclusion

We can now see the complete reversal of the three opening propositions. First, the iconography of Athena does not signify native Hellenic pride, but the importation of a Greek deity layered over an indigenous Anatolian identity, permanently displacing the native baetyl of Basileus Kaunios. Second, the coin does not represent true economic sovereignty; struck on the light Rhodian standard (1.09 g), it confirms Kaunos's continued reliance on the economic infrastructure of the power from whom it was liberated. Third, the sword is sheathed not in confidence, but in dependence. The city's autonomy was a temporary strategic utility granted by the Roman Senate in 167 BCE, brutally forfeited following Kaunos's participation in Mithridates' massacre in 88 BCE, and permanently extinguished by Roman decree when the city was returned to Rhodian control in 81 BCE.

Bibliography

• Appian. The Mithridatic Wars 23. In Roman History, translated by Horace White. Loeb Classical Library.

• Ashton, Richard H. J. "The Hellenistic Hemidrachms of Kaunos." Revue belge de numismatique 145 (1999): 141–154, plates 14–16.

• Berthold, Richard M. Rhodes in the Hellenistic Age. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

• Frei, Peter, and Christian Marek. "Die karisch-griechische Bilingue von Kaunos: Eine zweisprachige Staatsurkunde des 4. Jh.s v. Chr." Kadmos 36 (1997): 1–89.

• Herodotus. The Histories 1.171–172. Translated by A. D. Godley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920.

• Historia Numorum Online. "Caria - Kaunos," type 286 (temporary number). Edited by Koray Konuk. Bordeaux: Ausonius Institute (UMR 5607) / CNRS, Université Bordeaux Montaigne.

• Konuk, Koray. “The Early Coinage of Kaunos.” In Studies in Greek Numismatics in Memory of Martin Jessop Price, edited by Richard Ashton and Silvia Hurter, 197–223. London: Spink, 1998.

• Magie, David. Roman Rule in Asia Minor, to the End of the Third Century after Christ. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950.

• Polybius. The Histories 30.5; 31.4–5. Translated by W. R. Paton. Loeb Classical Library.

• Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, Deutschland: Sammlung Hans von Aulock. Heft 7, Karien, no. 2568. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1962.

• Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, Copenhagen: The Royal Collection of Coins and Medals, Caria, no. 185. Copenhagen, 1947.

• Strabo. Geography 14.2.3. Translated by H. L. Jones. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929.

• Stillwell, Richard, ed. “Kaunos (Dalyan) Turkey.” In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.