[Leica] IMG: Homeric

[john.nebel at csdco.com (John Nebel)]

Inspired by Jim's Homeric photos...

http://photos.csd.net/protesilaus.html

Mouse over to see reverse, click for an enlargement.

The head on the coin is Protesilaus, an Homeric hero; his name is
retrograde in the crest of his helmet.  The coin's reverse is the stern of a 
ship with the letters SKIO in the corners of the incuse naming the town 
Skione 
which issued the coin in the early 5th century BC. The ship is anachronistic 
as 
it appears to be 5th century design, more advanced than those used in the 
Trojan 
war around 700 years earlier.

"They who held Phylake and Pyrasos of the flowers,
the precinct of Demeter, and Iton, mother of sheepflocks,
Antron by the sea-shore, and Pteleos deep in the meadows,
of these in turn fighting Protesilaus was leader
while he lived; but now the black earth had closed him under,
whose wife, cheeks torn for grief, was left behind in Phylake
and a marriage half completed; a Dardanian man had killed him
as he leapt from his ship, far the first of all the Achaians."

(Iliad 2.695)

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protesilaus



Best,

John