Greek Coins
Greek coins carry more history per denomination than almost any other modern coinage. The drachma traced its name back to the ancient world — to a handful of metal rods used as currency before coins existed — and survived in various forms through the modern Greek state until the euro replaced it on a single day in January 2002. In the space of thirty years, the same five-drachma denomination carried the portrait of an exiled king under a military junta, then a Hellenistic philosopher under a restored democracy, then a different philosopher under a socialist government. The coin changed with the country. The denomination name did not.
The coins in this collection span that arc: monarchy, dictatorship, and republic, each one struck at the National Mint in Athens and each one carrying the particular tension of a country whose modern identity is inseparable from the civilization that preceded it by two and a half thousand years. Greece put Aristotle, Pericles, Democritus, and Homer on its pocket change — not as decoration, but as an argument that the modern state was the legitimate heir of the civilization that invented democracy, philosophy, and the Western alphabet. The coins made that argument every time they crossed a counter, and they made it in a script that most of the world cannot read.
