Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/352

Fig. 47. Coin of Messana.

and letters. The hare appears on the coins of Rhegium and Messana, having been chosen as a type, according to Aristotle, by the tyrant Anaxilas in commemoration of the introduction of that animal by him into Sicily; but it also appears on a rare coin of Messana, not as a main type, but as caressed by Pan. This does not prove that the hare was a symbol of Pan, but that for artistic purposes the rustic god in the act of caressing the hare is chosen instead of the more commonplace type of the hare all alone. So at Thasos the coins with old Silenus quaffing from a wine-cup do not signify that Silenus was a principal object of worship, but he is simply added for picturesque effect. We can at all events draw one conclusion from the historical origin assigned to both this type and that of the axe of Tenedos, that in the middle of the 4th cent. B.C. the Greeks did not see any religious significance in them, any more than they did in the representation of the mule-car which had won at Olympia, placed on his coins by Anaxilas. If, as has been so emphatically laid down by the leading modern Greek numismatists, the types on Greek coins are so essentially religious in origin, it is extremely difficult to explain the extraordinary rapidity with which all such notions as regards their origin must have vanished from the minds of the most learned of the Greeks, at so early a date as the 4th cent. B.C. (hardly more than two centuries after the introduction of the art of coining). The Greeks regarded those types from much the same point of view as we regard St George and the Dragon on sovereigns and crowns, or the Lady Godiva riding in puris naturalibus on the Coventry tokens. The effort