Poseidonia-Paestum e la sua moneta

This volume discusses the development of Poseidonia’s and Paestum’s numismatic production, presenting the results of the study conducted by the Greek and Roman Numismatic Group in the Department of Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale at the University of Salerno, in collaboration with the National Archaeological Museum at Paestum. The first part of the volume (= R. Cantilena) analyses the coins that Poseidonia minted, even if not continuously, from 530 BCE to the last years before the founding of the Roman colony. To understand how the Greek city used its coins have been organized according to their weight and type and also by numismatic findings from inside and outside the chora. New interpretations have been proposed for the silver coins with the inscriptions Fiis e Megyl. Previously, these inscriptions have been usually interpreted as the names of two oikists: Is of Helike, founder of Sybaris, and Megyllos or Megyllis, a founder of Poseidonia. However, this hypothesis appears debatable at best if one considers these coins in the context of the output of Poseidonia’s mint and, more broadly, of the general contemporary numismatic production. The volume focuses also on the analysis of the production of the early Lucanian settlement. On the surface, it appears that the local elites had adopted Greek cultural models: the coins minted in this period were staters and their fractions, they still used traditional types, and Greek inscriptions in Ionian alphabet were still common. However, there are several elements that show connections between Poseidonia’s coinage and the local Italic communities. Most importantly, the emission of a rare coin, minted using a die previously used by the Hyrietes, an ethnos probably located in the area between the Vesuvius and Sorrento. The coin die used in Poseidonia is similar to one used to mint coins at Thurii, at Hyria, and for the Fenserni. All these coins have the same type (head of Hera Lakinia) on one side and specific types on the other. This suggests that they were all produced in a single occasion, and they might have been used to pay mercenaries. Several Italic populations living on the Tyrrenian coast, in fact, fought as mercenaries at the service of Italiote towns. Similarly, many coins produced by Italiote towns that were at war with Italic populations between end of the 5th and the beginning of the 4th century BCE were found in the area around Poseidonia. Hoard findings in the territory of Poseidonia do not allow us to create a precise chronology of the last production of silver coins. Several scholars believe that the rare staters with the Oscan name Dossennos should be dated to the last third of the 4th century BCE. However, analysing the imagery and inscriptions, this study argues that silver coins were minted in Posedonia only until the middle of the 4th century BCE. Afterwards, bronze coins –which were already being minted since the end of the 5th century BCE– became heavier to replace the silver coins that were not produced anymore. On average bronze coins in this period weighted 25 gr and 13.5 gr. The general system of values adopted in this period seems to be similar to that of Syracuse under Dionysus, Thurii, and Croton. Poseidonia continued to mint bronze coins with Greek inscriptions until the first decade of the 3rd century BCE, when the city entered Rome’s sphere of influence.