Tradition, society and arms propaganda on ancient Greek coinage in the eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to identify the reasons for the choice of armament types on ancient Greek coins in order to understand the Hellenistic societies and their organisation as military oligarchies through the analysis of their message and communicative intention. The hoplite weaponry, which is well known for its multiple representations in other representations of Hellenistic material culture such as ceramics, sculptures and reliefs, is the most frequently repeated on ancient Greek coin-age. It is to this type of armorial representations, which become the emblem of a family and a society, that we would like to dedicate this work, based on the analysis of the numismatic types of the eastern Med-iterranean, collected in a list of coinage from the 6th-1st centuries BC with armorial representations and an eminent military message. In this way, it is possible to verify how, in such a propagandistic element as coins were in antiquity, hoplite weaponry was a source of pride and a symbol of social status and a testimony to the technological development of that society.
The message conveyed by the coins was a very useful communication tool for the Greek poleis at the time, as it represented an effective propagandistic action, which today is an unequalled source of his-torical documentation and is particularly interesting in iconographic and communicative terms.