The numismatic chronicle and journal of the Royal ... - IndianCoins.org

COINAGE OF ANTIOCHUS VIII OF SYRIA. 197his mother who imposed his cousin on him as a bridebefore her fall. Of his private life we are told that,like many of his ancestors, he was a greater lover ofostentatious state, and that he lavished much moneyon splendid feasts in the groves of Daphne. Also thathe was a poet a few scraps of his verse have comedown to us embodied in quotations in the physicianGalen. 5 Oddly enough their subject is snakes andpoison a topic that one would have expected thatthe son of Cleopatra would have avoided in his literaryexcursions.To these years 121-116 B.C., and the three of civil war,116-113 B.C., that followed, belongs undoubtedly thegreater part of the coinage of Grypus showing his secondstandard portrait. There are four main -issues of tetradrachms,all having as their obverse the king's portraitas a young man, well grown out of the boyishnessthat appears on the face that is coupled with that ofCleopatra on his earlier coinage, during his mother'sall theco-regency. The griffin's beak isgrowingtime it isdecidedly more prominent on the latestdated of these coins.The issues are first a Phoenician set, with the usualreverse of the eagle and palm-branch. The specimenchosen as an illustration is one issued at Ascalon in193 A.S., before Grypus had been reigning on his ownicount for more than a year. He is twenty-one, andlooks no older in this very youthful and rather pleasing>rtrait. 6The second and far more common set isthat which^presents on its reverse Zeus Ouranios standing to5Galen, Book XIV, 185. 6 PI. VIII. 2.