Smyrna & Boxing
- sulla80
- Apr 18
- 6 min read
The Coin
Today's coin of interest is a dichalkon. Everyday money. The head on the obverse has what Milne calls a "more angular pose" - Milne's group δ (delta) are the least refined coins from Smyrna's final autonomous period. The border is neater than the other dies of this group, and this coin has excellent details compared to many examples.
This is the workhorse coin, a coin that circulated, a coin that passed through hands. This coin weighs 3.22 grams. It is 15.5mm across. Milne records 54 specimens of this type weighed, with an average of 3.2 grams. This coin is exactly average 3.22g and 15.5mm - the mean of the whole series.
Here is an example acquired in 2022 of the older coin: predecessor in the cestus tradition to Iatrodoros by well over a century. I have been looking for a better example.
The Final Generation
Period XVII represents the last of the AE coins of almost independent (pseudo-autonomous) Smyrna. Milne counts approximately twenty magistrates names across this final period. Iatrodoros, the name on this coin, is among the last of them.
The autonomous coinage of Smyrna began its revival around 304 BC when the re-founded city on Mount Pagos started asserting itself in bronze. By the time Iatrodoros held the mint, that tradition has run for over two centuries. Period XVII is where it winds down - not because Smyrna fails, but because the Roman civil wars make fresh civic currency pointless. After about 50 BC, nothing. Augustus will eventually revive type M with his own face on the obverse, but as a Greek city striking in its own name, for its own citizens, under its own magistrates, the coins end here.
The context is the late Roman Republic, not the serene Hellenistic city-state of earlier periods. Smyrna has been in the Roman province of Asia since 133 BC, when Attalus III bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. The city sided early with Rome against Antiochus, against Mithridates and won privileges for it. But the privileges came with costs. Roman governors pass through and Roman tax-collectors too. The city's Greek civic institutions continue, the games continue, the magistracies continue but all in the shadow of a new Roman reality.
The mint reorganization that produced Period XVII's heavier standard maybe linked to Rome: when Roman bronze coinage ceased around 70 BC, Smyrnaean bronze drifted into wider regional circulation as a substitute, and the city may have deliberately increased the size to make its coins more competitive in that broader market.
Before Iatrodoros: The Crisis Coins
Period XVI - the provisional issue immediately preceding Iatrodoros's magistracy. Old Homereia hammered flat and restruck without any magistrate's name, because the mint is being reorganized and no official wants his name on substandard work.
Milne calls it "a hasty reissue to meet a temporary emergency". The coins are overstruck, crude, unstable. Anonymous by necessity - and Milne notes with a kind of dry sympathy that "no magistrate could fairly be saddled with the responsibility" for coins that fell so markedly below the standard of the new series being prepared.
Iatrodoros takes on a mint that has just gone through a crisis, a currency being rebuilt on a new and heavier standard, a city asserting its continued Greek identity through bronze production at the moment when identity is under pressure. His appointment as monetary magistrate can be seen as a return to normal civic function.
The Magistrates Name
Ἰατρόδωρος. Gift of the Healer. Milne's index places him simply: Period XVII δ, with coins in three denominations #403, #404, #405. Apollo Iatros, Apollo the Physician, was widely venerated across Ionia. A family connected to this epithet might be priestly, medical, or simply devoted to the healing aspect of the god who appears, laureate and angular, on the obverse of this coin.
There is a paradox in this name on this coin: the man whose name invokes medicine and healing commissioned coins whose main image is a hand in a caestus which celebrates the most violent sport of the Greek world.
Milne notes that Iatrodoros struck not just bronze but silver drachmas which he moved in his classification to an earlier point within Section III. He is among the more substantial magistrates of his period. He strikes the full bronze suite and silver during the year that he holds office.
The Denominations
In Period XVII, during his term, Iatrodoros oversees the entire output of the Smyrnaean mint. He strikes:
Type J : the Homereion, the large bronze obol, around 13 grams. Homer seated on the reverse — the city's greatest cultural claim, the coin Smyrnaeans called by the poet's own name. My example shown is about a century earlier than the coins of Iatrodoros.
Type M: the tetrachalkon, around 6 grams. Aphrodite Stratonikis, the city's civic goddess, full-faced, holding a short sceptre, a bird in the field beside her.
Type L: the dichalkon, around 3.2 grams. Apollo on the obverse, the hand in the caestus on the reverse, a single palm-leaf upward. (our coin)
And silver drachmas - the prestige denomination, struck in smaller quantities.
The Caestus
On the obverse: Apollo Iatros, who shares his etymology with the magistrate who commissioned the die.
On the reverse: the right hand, open, fingers spread. The caestus bound at wrist and knuckle. This is not the crude leather strap, the himantes, of the early Olympic period. By the first century BC the caestus has evolved into something heavier: layered hardened ox-hide, lead bosses concentrated at the knuckle, designed not to protect the hand but to amplify its force, a weapon. The fingers are spread in the gesture of a hand that has just struck. To the right, a single palm-leaf upward. ΣΜΥΡΝΑΙΩΝ curving above. ΙΑΤΡΟΔΩΡΟΣ reading downward on the left.
Five centuries before this coin was struck, a Smyrnaean gave the world organized boxing. Onomastos of Smyrna won the first Olympic boxing competition in 688 BC, the 23rd Olympiad, and is credited with codifying the rules of the sport. The caestus type appears on Smyrnaean bronze across multiple periods and multiple magistrates because Smyrna's claim to boxing is, like it's claim to Homer, a source of pride.
The Games
Apollo was patron of the Pythian Games at Delphi, the second most prestigious of the four Panhellenic festivals. A Smyrnaean boxer who wins at Delphi brings the god on this coin full circle: Apollo blesses the contest, the contest produces a winner, the palm frond records the victory, the coin commemorates the whole sequence.
The more immediate context for this coin is likely Smyrna's own festival circuit. The local games, reorganized in the Hellenistic period, drawing athletes from across Ionia. The fight itself: pygmachia, Greek boxing, has no rounds, no time limit, no weight classes, no ground fighting. The rules Onomastos codified five centuries ago still govern the contest.
"At the twenty-third Festival they restored the prizes for boxing, and the victor was Onomastus of Smyrna, which already was a part of Ionia."
-Pausanias, 5.8.7The ancient sources, taken together with the broader evidence of Greek boxing practice, give a picture of the rules. There was a distinction between boxing (pygmachia) and the pankration, which allowed almost everything.
No kicking, biting, or eye-gouging.
No ring.
No rounds and no time limit. The contest continued until one man could not or would not go on.
Victory by knockout or submission.
Intentional killing was forbidden and resulted in the killer losing the match.
All blows were directed at the head.
The palm frond goes to the man still standing. No bell rings. The fight simply ends.
Epilogue
A magistrate whose name means "gift of the healer." A denomination worth two chalki. The last autonomous coinage of a city that claimed Homer, Onomastos, and Apollo - that vied with Ephesus and Pergamum for the title of First City of Asia, that sided with Rome and prospered for centuries.
In September 1922, fire destroyed Smyrna. What stands today is a Turkish city of four million built on top of the ruins, with almost nothing visible above ground that predates the burning.
This coin survived over two thousand years - and outlasted the city.
References
Milne, J.G. "The Autonomous Coinage of Smyrna." The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society, Fifth Series, Vol. 3 (1923), pp. 1–30.
Milne, J.G. "The Autonomous Coinage of Smyrna (Continued)." The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society, Fifth Series, Vol. 7 (1927), pp. 1–107.
Milne, J.G. "The Autonomous Coinage of Smyrna (Continued)." The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society, Fifth Series, Vol. 8, No. 31/32 (1928), pp. 131–171.
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