A Seleucid Rarity

Today's coin of interest is a rare Seleucid drachm that carries an unusually well documented recent history. It sold at Roma Numismatics in March 2023 for 417 USD, then resurfaced six more times through a single successor firm, The Coin Cabinet, in October 2024, March 2025, October 2025, November 2025, February 2026, and August 2026, hammering each time in a narrow band between 344 and 505 USD. That is seven sales in under four years, at a price that never really moved. This looks less like seven collectors changing their minds than like one coin waiting for a buyer willing to meet its number. I was eventually that buyer after it failed to sell in August. Given how many times it failed to find a buyer before me, I have almost certainly paid more than the market was prepared to pay. I also think the market was not right about this undervalued Seleucid rarity.

Roma wound down its business, with a final liquidation auction in April 2024 and closing on 24 May 2024. One of Roma's ancient coin cataloguers, Joe Hazell, left the firm and joined a newer London auction house and dealer called The Coin Cabinet as its Ancient Coin Specialist in June 2023; he is now its Managing Director and Head of Ancient Numismatics. I wonder if that connection is how the coin moved to TCC.

However it all worked out, it is a rare drachm from a short lived emperor at the end of the Seleucid dynasty that I am thrilled to add to my collection.

Succession

Seleukos VI was the eldest son of Antiochos VIII Grypos and Kleopatra Tryphaina, and on his father's death, circa 96 BC, he took the throne name Epiphanes Nikator," combining the epithet Epiphanes (Illustrious) borne by his father with Nikator (Conqueror), the epithet of his grandfather Demetrios II. Most of his coinage carries both titles together.

Being born into the Seleucid royal family was not exactly a gift. Eusebius writes of the rise of Seleucus VI to the throne:

"After Antiochus Grypus died at the time which was stated above, his son Seleucus circulated around with an army and seized many cities. Antiochus Cyzicenus brought an army from Antioch, but was defeated in battle. Now his horse carried him into the midst of the enemy. When they were about to capture him, he drew his sword and committed suicide. Thus Seleucus gained control of the entire kingdom, and captured Antioch."
-Eusebios, Chronicle (Schoene ed.) 1.259, corresponding to Porphyry of Tyre, FGrHist 260 F32.25.

Modern: Today we watch Charles III, King of the United Kingdom, manage a public falling out between his sons, William and Harry. Set against the history of monarchy, that is tame stuff.

Roman: Constantine the Great had his own eldest son, Crispus, executed in 326 AD, and his wife Fausta killed soon after, by later tradition locked in an overheated bath, though Constantine ordered the record of it destroyed and no contemporary account survives to say why.

Greek: When Alexander died, his self-styled Successors, the Diadochoi, spent the forty years fighting each other for the pieces of his empire. Their descendants kept fighting: a Ptolemaic king, Ptolemy VIII, killed his own twelve year old son by Kleopatra II and sent the body to the boy's mother on her birthday, and a Seleucid queen, Kleopatra Thea, had one son killed for taking the throne without her permission and then tried to poison a second, who forced the cup back on her instead.

Ottoman: The Ottoman sultans eventually wrote family killings into law: Mehmed II ruled in the fifteenth century that a new sultan could lawfully kill his brothers "for the common benefit of the people", a law under which Mehmed III had nineteen of his killed at his own accession in 1595.

A Seleucid prince, a maternal descendant of Ptolemy, who killed his uncle and in turn was killed by his cousin was just a common player in the game of dynastic politics.

The Coin

Seleukid Kingdom, Antioch on the Orontes. Seleukos VI 'Epiphanes Nikator'. AR drachm (3.78g, 18mm). Circa 96 to 94 BC.

Obv: diademed head right.

Rev: BAΣIΛEΩΣ ΣEΛEYKOY NIKATOPOΣ, Nike advancing left, holding wreath; monogram above A in left field, C in inner left field.

Ref: SC-2416; SMA-427; HGC 9-1273; NGC XF Strike: 5/5 Surface: 3/5; scuffs, 4935553-010.

Note: Extremely Rare; only 4 other unique examples on CoinArchives.

Provenance: Ex Roma Numismatics Ltd, Auction XXVII (22/3/2023), lot 395.

A small group of silver issues from the end of Seleukos VI's time at Antioch names him as Nikator alone (dropping the EΠIΦANOYΣ) , and this drachm belongs to that group. This piece is placed near the close of his reign, in the months just before he lost the city in 95/4 BC.

The Mint City

For most of the Seleucid Kingdom's history, Antioch on the Orontes was the dynasty's own capital, and holding it meant holding the throne. Seleukos I Nikator founded the city in 300 BC, naming it for his father Antiochos, and sited it on the Orontes river at the western end of the caravan routes that carried goods from Persia and the interior of Asia down to the Mediterranean.

The city had its own port at Seleukeia Pieria giving it access to the sea as well. Together with Seleukeia, Apameia, and Laodikeia it formed the Seleucid Tetrapolis, the four sister cities of northern Syria. It remained the dynastic capital until Pompey annexed Syria to Rome in 64 BC, and even afterward, as capital of Rome's own province of Syria. It grew into what ancient writers and modern historians alike rank as the third largest city of the Roman world, after Rome and Alexandria itself. When Seleukos VI held it, for less than a year, from 95 BC to the middle of 94 BC, he was sitting, briefly, at the center of Seleucid power.

A Princeton expedition 1932-1939 uncovered a wealth of objects, ranging from marble statues and mosaics to coins and figurines. However, nearly all is from later Roman and Byzantine periods and very few remains from the older city have surfaced. While there are abundant literary descriptions of Seleucid Antioch there is scant physical evidence. (See Also: Princeton Excavations "To get down to the level of the Seleucid city involved an excavation 11 metres deep on a very cramped site.")

 The stoning of St Stephen. Oil painting by or after Lorenzo Sabbatini, 1530-1576. from the Wellcome Collection; Public Domain

Centuries later, Antioch played a significant role in the early spread of Christianity. After Stephen, 33/34 AD, was stoned in Jerusalem for his faith in Christ, many disciples fled to Antioch in order to escape persecution (Acts 7.54-8.3; 11:19). Other disciples soon arrived in Antioch and preached the Gospel to Greeks (11:20-21).

The History

The Porphyry of Tyre as preserved in Eusebios's Chronicle, places the murder of Antiochos VIII in the fourth year of the 170th Olympiad, conventionally 97 or 96 BC. Seleukos, who had established his base at Seleukeia on the Kalykadnos river in Kilikia (Cilicia), used that year to prepare a campaign against his uncle, Antiochos IX Kyzikenos, who held the rest of Syria. In 96/5 BC he invaded, defeated Kyzikenos, and, in the plain language of Flavius Josephos, "defeating him, captured and killed him" (Ioudaïke Archaiologia, or Jewish Antiquities, 13.366, translated by Ralph Marcus for the Loeb Classical Library).

The Armenian recension of Eusebios's Chronicle tells the episode differently, having Kyzikenos's horse carry him into the enemy's midst and the king kill himself with his own sword rather than be taken; the two traditions agree that Kyzikenos died in the encounter but disagree on whether Seleukos or Kyzikenos's own hand ended it.

Kyzikenos left a son, who took the field against his cousin under the name Antiochos X and, within about a year, drove Seleukos out of Antioch in turn. It was during that one uncertain year at Antioch, from 95 BC to roughly the middle of 94 BC, that Seleukos struck his fullest and best silver coinage, tetradrachms of the Attic weight standard alongside smaller issues of drachms, hemidrachms, and diobols; the diobols are, on present evidence, the last coins of that denomination struck by any Seleukid king.

This drachm belongs to that same brief Antiochene series. Its reverse, Nike striding forward with a wreath, was not new to Seleukos; it repeats the drachm reverse used by his father Antiochos VIII. The filial claim of the coin's imagery is made in words by the Epiphanes Nikator.

Expelled from Antioch, Seleukos withdrew toward Kilikia and the city the Greek sources call Mopsuestia, earlier known as Mopsos. Josephos reports that once there he tried to extort money from the inhabitants, and that "the people of Mopsuestia were indignant at this, and setting fire to his palace, destroyed him together with his friends" (Antiquities 13.368, Marcus translation), a killing carried out by the townspeople themselves.

The Armenian Eusebios instead has Seleukos, learning that the citizens meant to burn him alive, take his own life first, so that the fire consumed a man already dead by his own hand rather than a man burned alive by the mob.

A separate, Latin branch of the same Chronicle, as preserved in Jerome's adaptation, states instead that Antiochos X himself burned Seleukos alive, making the rival king the direct agent of the killing. Appian, writing later in his Syriake, agrees that Seleukos was burned to death but places it not in his palace but in the city's gymnasium, and adds that the king was, in the historian's own judgment, violent and tyrannical, a characterization Seleucid Coins' editors appear to follow directly. Four tellings of one death survive, agreeing that Seleukos died by fire at Mopsuestia, probably in 94 BC, and disagreeing on both who set the fire and where.

A drachm, a smaller and more personal denomination than the tetradrachms that dominate Seleukos's coinage, surviving today in Extremely Fine condition with a well struck obverse portrait, is a genuinely uncommon object. Only four further examples are recorded on CoinArchives, an auction database, which is consistent with a reign that lasted about two years and ended in violence and the loss of the mint that struck the coin.

References:

• Appian. Roman History, Volume II: The Syrian Wars. Translated by Horace White. Loeb Classical Library 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912. Syrian Wars 69.

• Eusebius of Caesarea. Chronicorum libri duo. Edited by Alfred Schoene. 2 vols. Berlin: Weidmann, 1866–1875.

• Eusebius of Caesarea. Chronicle (Armenian version), Kings of Asia Minor and Syria. Translated by Andrew Smith. Attalus.org.

• Jerome. Chronicle. Translated by Roger Pearse and collaborators. Online edition, 2005. Based on the Latin text edited by J. K. Fotheringham (1923), following the arrangement of Rudolf Helm's edition (1956).

• Josephus, Flavius. Jewish Antiquities, Volume V: Books XII–XIV. Translated by Ralph Marcus. Loeb Classical Library 365. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. Text at Attalus.org: https://www.attalus.org/translate/aj_13c.html

• Houghton, Arthur, Catharine Lorber, and Oliver D. Hoover. Seleucid Coins: A Comprehensive Catalogue. Part 2: Seleucus IV through Antiochus XIII. 2 vols. New York, Lancaster, and London: American Numismatic Society and Classical Numismatic Group, 2008.

• Newell, Edward T. "The Seleucid Mint of Antioch." American Journal of Numismatics 51 (1917): 1–152.

• The Antiochepedia https://libaniusredux.blogspot.com/