The Chimaera on Ancient Coins

by L. R. C. Brickell

The Chimaera may be one of the most bizarre hybrid monsters from ancient Greek myth. In addition to last year’s post exploring that topic we’re extremely pleased to present this contribution about the popularity of the Chimaera on ancient coins—an especially interesting use of the creature.

Forget the proud eagle or seated Britannia of modern coins; the Greeks carried monsters in their pockets! Among the most fearsome was the Chimaera, “a lion at the front, a snake at the back, and a she-goat in the middle,” who could “breathe forth the terrible might of blazing fire” (Homer, Iliad 6.181–182). What follows is an exploration of how the Chimaera appeared on coins in antiquity, a story which spans nearly a millennium and straddles the Greek and Roman worlds.

Above: The Chimaera on a red-figure dish from Apulia (South Italy), ca. 350 BCE. Public domain. Photo credit: Jastrow, via Wikimedia Commons; museum credit: Musée du Louvre.

The Chimaera in Myth

We should first understand our monster’s place in mythology. The Chimaera was “born from gods, not men” (Homer, Iliad 6. 180). While our earliest writers don’t specify the parents, later mythographers identify her father as Typhoeus (Typhon), a snake-like giant, and her mother as Echidna, half-woman, half-snake (Hyginus, Fabulae 151; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.3.1). Typhoeus and Echidna gave birth to many of our favorite monsters: the Sphinx, the Hydra, and Cerberus, to name a few. The Chimaera features most prominently in the tale of the Greek hero Bellerophon, of which there are many accounts; here is my attempt to stitch together one of many possible narratives from our surviving literary sources.

Bellerophon, a handsome warrior from Corinth, was exiled for the murder of a family member (the circumstances are unclear) and pleaded for ritual purification from Proetus, the king of nearby Tiryns, who kindly absolved him of his crime. This king’s wife, however, fell in love with Bellerophon, and asked the hero to sleep with her. When he refused, she lied to her husband that Bellerophon had tried to seduce her instead. While Proetus was outraged, he was afraid to kill a guest he had welcomed himself; so he handed Bellerophon a letter written on a sealed wooden tablet and sent him off to Lycia, a region in Anatolia across the Aegean. There, another king, who was Proetus’ father-in-law, hosted Bellerophon with feasts for nine days. On the tenth, he asked to see the tablet. When at last he read it through and understood that king Proetus wanted his new guest dead, the Lycian king sent Bellerophon to slay the Chimaera, certain that the hero would die in the attempt.

The fearsome creature had been terrorizing the locals, and the task might have proved impossible alone, but Bellerophon had divine help. On his way to face the Chimaera, he met Polyeidos, a seer who advised him to sleep in the temple of Athena. He did so. In his dream, the goddess appeared and handed over a golden bridle; when he awoke, Bellerophon found the bridle beside him and used it to tame the winged horse Pegasus. Ready at last to face the Chimaera, he mounted Pegasus, reached the beast, and began to shoot arrows at her as he flew just out of reach. This was unfortunately not enough, so Bellerophon devised a plan: he attached a lump of lead to his spear, lodged it in the beast’s throat, and watched the Chimaera suffocate as her fire-breath melted the metal. The Lycian king, taken aback at Bellerophon’s unexpected victory, sent him on two more perilous quests, but Bellerophon was also successful in these: He vanquished the Solymi and Amazons (both were nearby warrior peoples), and defeated every Lycian warrior involved in a last-ditch ambush. At last, the Lycian king realized that Bellerophon was a son of the gods, and gave up trying to kill him; instead, the king handed him his daughter and half his kingdom.

Above: Bellerophon slays the Chimaera on a Gallo-Roman mosaic from Autun (France), 2nd c. CE. Public domain. Photo and museum credit: Musée Rolin Autun.

Electrum: Earliest Coins

With this mythological background, we can now trace the Chimaera’s journey through ancient coinage. Although she was commonly featured on earlier proto-Corinthian pottery, the oldest coin to depict the Chimaera dates from the first half of the sixth century BCE, and comes from northwest Asia Minor. It weighs a hefty 16 grams of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver used for coins since their invention in the seventh century and before the advent of silver coinage (which proved much more convenient for smaller transactions). This oldest Chimaera coin type was once believed to have originated from the cities of Corinth and Sicyon, since—as we will soon see—the Chimaera features prominently on the coinage of these cities; we now know that this is false, but cannot say where in Ionia in Asia Minor it was minted. The style is archaic, but the representation of the Chimaera—standing, facing left—is the same as that found on many later coins.

Below: The Chimaera on an electrum stater from northwest Asia Minor, ca. 600-560 BCE. Photo credit: Roma Numismatics Ltd. (The stater was a coin used across the ancient Greek world.)

Even after silver became standard, a handful of cities in Asia Minor—namely Phocaea, Mytilene, and Cyzicus—continued to produce coinage in electrum. Cyzicus’ coins in particular feature a dazzling menagerie of mythological creatures, including another roaring Chimaera. She is accompanied this time by a tunny fish, which Cyzicus used to distinguish its coins from the output of other cities. Unlike on the example above, the head of the goat and the snake face backwards, so numismatists—people who specialize in the study of coins—theorize that this type copies a depiction of the Chimaera in pottery. It is unfortunately difficult to say much about the significance of these two coin types: For the former, as with all early electrum coins, we lack enough information; and for the latter, the Chimaera was just one of many beasts featured on Cyzicus’ prolific coinage, and might not have carried any special significance for the city.

Below: Electrum stater from Cyzicus, ca. 550–500 BCE. Photo credit: Roma Numismatics Ltd.

The City of Sicyon: War and Peace

While these early electrum coinage issues from Asia Minor remain mysterious, we have more luck when we turn to the Greek mainland, and to the city of Sicyon in particular. Sicyon’s symbol was the dove—a bird sacred to the Greeks, often used for augury and associated with love and peace—but the Chimaera appears on her coinage more than on that of any other city. The silver staters and hemidrachms (half-drachma coins) are the most abundant. They depict a dove flying, sometimes within a wreath, and the Chimaera walking left, iconography that seems to suggest the themes of both war and peace. At first, it seems unusual that Sicyon would choose the Chimaera to feature so heavily on its coinage; the myth of Bellerophon was most associated with Corinth, after all. We can look for meaningful solutions—maybe the people of Sicyon also claimed Bellerophon, since Corinth was located just 17 kilometers southwest?—but it is entirely possible that whoever was in charge of designing the city’s coinage thought that a fearful fire-breathing monster like the Chimaera would make for a pleasing contrast with the dove. It is common, after all, to see ancient coins playfully re-appropriating motifs from elsewhere in classical art.

Below: Silver stater from Sicyon, ca. 335–330 BCE., with the Chimaera on the obverse (front/”heads”) and a dove on the reverse (“tails”). Photo credit: Classical Numismatic Group. The Greek letters ΣΕ (sigma and epsilon) are a monogram for the city’s name, which in the Doric dialect was Sekyon, a spelling used through the fifth century BCE. (In the fourth century BCE, ΣΙ became more common.)

Corinth: Bellerophon’s True Home

This brings us to Corinth, the city for which the myth of Bellerophon was most significant and therefore widely commemorated on coinage. Bellerophon came from Corinth, and he found Pegasus at the city’s main fountain, Peirene, the winged horse’s watering hole. Corinth’s archaic and classical staters, weighing 8.6 grams of silver and traded across the ancient world, feature a helmeted Athena and Pegasus flying—or, rarely, in other positions: standing, walking, drinking, and so on. Before Corinth was rebuilt as a Roman colony in 44 BCE, the city’s coinage featured the Chimaera in only two ways: as a secondary symbol next to Athena on the silver staters, and fully depicted on rare emissions of silver hemistaters, aka trihemidrachms. Hundreds of symbols appear on Corinth’s staters, so the first is not remarkable; the trihemidrachms, however, also feature Bellerophon riding Pegasus on the other side. That is, the engraver ingeniously “uses both sides of the coin to tell the story,” as top Greek numismatist Basil Demetriadi would say. This same type appears elsewhere, on coins from Corinth’s colonies, issued in both silver and bronze. Whether the Chimaera has any iconographic significance in these issues—say, symbolizing an enemy subdued by the city—is difficult to say, but in any case the silver trihemidrachms remain beloved and fiercely fought over among collectors today.

Below: Silver trihemidrachm from Corinth, ca. 350–330 BCE, with Bellerophon riding Pegasus on the obverse and the Chimaera on the reverse. Photo credit: Classical Numismatics Group.

In 146 BCE, the Romans set fire to Corinth and killed every man; in 44 BCE, they built a new city on the site and later made it the capital of their province of Achaea. Under the late Republic and Principate (early Imperial period), Corinth’s coinage began to flourish again: The city was no longer issuing silver coins, and, under the Principate, had to include the emperor’s bust; but starting in this transitional period Corinth chose for the first time to feature full tableaux from mythology, as illustrated below. On the earlier trihemidrachms, Pegasus and the Chimaera appeared on different sides. Now, at last, Corinth celebrated in detail the momentous battle between the two. Their old city was lost, they had been subjugated by the Romans—and yet, like the people of many other city-states, the Corinthians found coinage the perfect medium to peacefully express their civic identity … with a not so peaceful monster.

Below: Bronze as from Corinth, 34–31 BCE (late Republic) featuring the head of Venus and the lettering CORINT on the obverse, and the fight between Bellerophon, Pegasus, and the Chimaera on the reverse. The as was a basic Roman unit of currency. The Latin script—Q CAECIL NIGR / C HEIO PAM / IIVIR— honors two Roman duovirs (magistrates), Quintus Caecilius Niger and Gaius Heius Pamphilus. Photo credit: Classical Numismatic Group.

Significance

The Chimaera’s millennium-long journey on ancient coins—from the oldest electrum of Asia Minor to the classical silver of Sicyon and the late bronze of Corinth under Roman rule—teaches us how the Greeks understood and used mythological creatures in art. In Corinth, the battle-scenes between Bellerophon and the Chimaera were a real source of civic pride, even when the city was under Roman sway. In Sicyon, the Chimaera provided pleasing visual contrast with the city’s symbol, the dove: an imaginary, aggressive beast on one side; a real, docile bird on the other. We are left, of course, with many more questions than answers. Where was the earliest coin to depict the Chimaera minted? Why did Sicyon choose the Chimaera in particular? What can we say about the backwards-facing goats on the coins of Cyzicus? These unknowns, I think, are part of what makes studying the classical world so fascinating, and it’s all the more thrilling when you’re hunting through dusty coin catalogues for a fire-breathing monster like the Chimaera.