Greek city Bronze 22mm
Struck circa 300-200 B.C.
Laureate head of Apollo right.
Tripod.
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provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of
Authenticity. A sacrificial tripod was a type of
altar used by the
ancient Greeks. The most famous was the
Delphic
tripod, on
which the Pythian
priestess took her seat to deliver the
oracles of the
deity. The seat was formed by a circular slab on the top of the tripod, on which
a branch of
laurel was deposited when it was unoccupied by the priestess. In this sense,
by Classical times the tripod was sacred to
Apollo. The
mytheme of
Heracles
contesting with Apollo for the tripod appears in vase-paintings older than the
oldest written literature. The oracle originally may have been related to the
primal deity, the Earth.
Another well-known tripod was the
Plataean Tripod, made from a tenth part of the spoils taken from the
Persian army after the
Battle of Plataea. This consisted of a golden basin, supported by a
bronze
serpent with three heads (or three serpents intertwined), with a list of the
states that had taken part in the war inscribed on the coils of the serpent. The
golden bowl was carried off by the
Phocians during
the
Third Sacred War; the stand was removed by the emperor
Constantine to
Constantinople (modern
Istanbul),
where it still can be seen in the
hippodrome, the Atmeydanı, although in damaged condition, the heads
of the serpents disappeared however one is now on display at the nearby Istanbul
Archaeology Museums. The inscription, however, has been restored almost
entirely. Such tripods usually had three ears (rings which served as
handles) and frequently had a central upright as support in addition to the
three legs.
Tripods frequently are mentioned by
Homer as prizes
in
athletic games and as complimentary gifts; in later times, highly decorated
and bearing inscriptions, they served the same purpose. They also were used as
dedicatory
offerings to the deities, and in the dramatic contests at the
Dionysia
the victorious
choregus (a wealthy citizen who bore the expense of equipping and training
the chorus) received a crown and a tripod. He would either dedicate the tripod
to some deity or set it upon the top of a marble structure erected in the form
of a small circular temple in a street in
Athens, called
the street of tripods, from the large number of memorials of this kind.
One of these, the
Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, erected by him to commemorate his victory
in a dramatic contest in
335 BC, still
stands. The form of the victory tripod, now missing from the top of the
Lysicrates monument, has been rendered variously by scholars since the
eighteenth century.
The scholar
Martin L. West writes that the sibyl at Delphi shows many traits of
shamanistic practices, likely inherited or influenced from Central Asian
practices. He cites her sitting in a cauldron on a tripod, while making her
prophecies, her being in an ecstatic trance state, similar to shamans, and her
utterings, unintelligible.
According to Herodotus (The Histories, I.144), the victory tripods were not
to be taken from the temple sanctuary precinct, but left there for dedication.
The history of
Ancient Greek coinage can be divided (along with most other Greek art
forms) into three periods, the Archaic, the Classical, and the
Hellenistic. The Archaic period extends from the introduction of coinage to
the Greek world in about
600 BCE until the
Persian Wars in about
480 BCE. The Classical period then began, and lasted until the conquests of
Alexander
the Great in about
330 BC, which
began the Hellenistic period, extending until the
Roman
absorption of the Greek world in the 1st century BCE. The Greek cities continued
to produce their own coins for several more centuries under Roman rule, called
Roman provincial coins.
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