The reader will see that the obverse bears the legend IAKIN, and the reverse a representation of the brooch described by Ulysses (Od. xix. 225-231). A translation of this passage is given on [page 80].
The cross line of the A is not visible in the original, but no doubt is felt at the Museum about its having existed.
There seems, however, to be more doubt whether the legend should be IAKIN, or ΓIAKIN—Γ being the older form of Π. Possibly from a desire to be right in either case, the Museum catalogue gives it as IAKIN in the illustration, and ΓIAKIN in the descriptive letterpress. The one reading will do nearly as well as the other for my argument, which only requires that the coin should belong to the Eryx and Segesta group and be dated about 430 B.C.—neither of which points are doubted. I will, however, give the reasons that convince me that IAKIN is the true reading.
Firstly, neither I nor some artist friends of mine whose opinion is infinitely better worth having than my own, can find any traces of a Γ between the lowermost boss and the neck. I am aware that some experts of the highest competence profess to be able to detect such traces, but the artist who figured the coin in the Museum Catalogue evidently could not do so, and the experts do not seem to have had such confidence in their own opinion as to make him alter his drawing.
Secondly, the composition is obviously and intentionally symmetrical. It would be abhorrent to the instincts of the man who could design so exquisite a coin to destroy its balance by crowding a Γ into the place which must be assigned to it if it exists at all.
Thirdly, Piacus, to which town the coin had been ascribed by the dealer from whom the Museum bought it, is mentioned very briefly by Stephanus Byzantinus, but by no other writer, as a Sicilian city, and he expressly states that its citizens were called ΠΙΑΚΗΝΟΙ; so that the coin, if it was one of theirs, should bear the legend ΓΙΑΚΗΝ instead of the alleged ΓIAKIN. Stephanus Byzantinus did not write till about 500 A.D., and in the absence of any statement from him to the effect that Piacus was an old city, it argues some recklessness to conclude that it had existed for at least a thousand years when he mentioned it; there is no evidence from any quarter to support such a conclusion, and a safer one will be that the dealer above referred to, not knowing where the coin came from, and looking for a city in Stephanus Byzantinus, found he could get nothing nearer than Piacus—whereon he saw a Γ as the smallest thing he could do in Πs, into his coin, and sold it to the British Museum probably for a song as compared with the value which it now proves to have. Thus the Museum authorities having got it into part of their notes (for they seem to have got IAKIN into another part) that the legend was ΓΙΑΚΗΝ, have very naturally been led to see more on the coin than those who have no notes will quite bear them out in seeing. But I will add no more. The legend is obviously IAKIN.
This is an abbreviation for ΙΑΚΙΝΩΝ, as ΕΡΥΚΙΝ and ΚΕΝΤΟΡΙΠΙΝ are for ΕΡΥΚΙΝΩΝ and ΚΕΝΤΟΡΙΠΙΝΩ, not to quote further examples. It means that the people who struck it were called ΙΑΚΙΝΕΣ, and though we cannot determine the precise name of their city we may infer with confidence that it was some derivative of ΙΑΚΟΣ, which is given in Liddell and Scott as meaning Ionian. The name may very likely have been ΙΑΞ though I cannot find any authority for the existence of such a town.
I hold, therefore, that as late as B.C. 430 there was near Trapani a town still more or less autonomous, which claimed Ionian descent and which also claimed to be in some special way connected with the Odyssey; for I am assured that nothing would be allowed on a coin except what had an important bearing on the anterior history of those who struck it. Admitting that the reverse of the coin in question must be taken as a reproduction of Ulysses' brooch—and I found no difference of opinion among the numismatists at the Museum on this head—it is hard to see what more apposite means of saying "Odyssey" upon a coin can be suggested than to stamp it with the subject which invites numismatic treatment more than any other in the whole poem. It seems to me, then, that though the theory that there was an Ionian city in the neighbourhood of Eryx which could claim connection with the Odyssey will stand perfectly well without the coin, the coin cannot stand without involving the existence of an Ionian city near Eryx which claimed connection with the Odyssey. Happily, though the coin is unique, there is no question as to its genuineness.
To those, therefore, who ask me for monuments, ruins of buildings, historical documents to support a Sicano-Ionian civilisation near Eryx in times heretofore prehistoric, I reply that as late as 430 B.C. all these things appear to have existed. Letting alone the testimony of Thucydides, surely an Ionian coin is no small historical document in support of an Ionian city. A coin will say more in fewer words and more authoritatively than anything else will. The coin in question cannot belong to an Ionian colony on Mt. Eryx or thereabouts recently established in 430 B.C. We should have heard of such a colony; how inconceivable again is the bringing in of the Odyssey on this supposition. If the city existed at all it can only have done so as a survival of the Phocæan settlement of which Thucydides tells us.
I want no evidence for the survival of such a settlement in later times; it is not incumbent upon me to show whether it survived or no; the abundant, I might almost say super-abundant, coincidences between all both Scherian and Ithacan scenes in the Odyssey, and Trapani with its immediate neighbourhood, is enough to demonstrate the Trapanese origin of the poem. Its pre-Syracusan and pre-Sicelian indications fix it as not later than about 1050 B.C., its dialect, Ionic-Æolian, connects it with the Phocæans above referred to. It does not concern me to show what became of these Phocæans after the Odyssey had been written; what I have said about the coin IAKIN is said more in the interests of the coin than of the Odyssey, which is a more potent and irrefragable proof of its own provenance and date than any coin struck some 600 years later can conceivably be. Still, the coin being there, I use it to answer those who demand some evidence external to the Odyssey itself. When they ask me where are my monuments, I answer that they are within the coin, circumscribed by the small cincture of an inch and a half at most. For a coin is a city in little; he who looks on one beholds a people, an evidence of title, a whole civilisation with its buildings of every kind. Destroy these, but so long as a single one of its coins remains, the city though dead is yet alive, and the fact of its having had buildings that could become ruinous is as palpable as though the ruins themselves had come down to us.