![Image](https://greekcitytimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/coins-1024x742-1-1024x600.jpg)
Crimean coin. Taken from Hermitage, sold by (under the orders of) Stalin.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/05 ... eaking-48m
Gee, I wonder what nationality the oligarch buyer is ...
Z-bag.
The significance of Panticapaeum (=Kerch) should not be lost on anyone reading the news in the last decade or so.
Random reactions: Note the body-double? Offering to The Beast? The Thieving Soviet, always. "Gifts" to the embodiment of Evil, Mammon.
This story is interesting merely for the fact it is a new, record-setting ancient coin price. What is $6mln, anyway. Was the previous record a fake?
Godfrey Locker Lampson, the early 20th century British politician and noted collector of ancient Greek coins who owned a coin struck from the same die, once wrote of its design: “The head of the satyr is a marvel of speaking portraiture. That so much expression could be packed into so small a round would not be believed by anyone who had not seen it.”
That facial expression. A satyr was (symbolically) a desperate, aged homosexual who lurked in the forests at boundaries where he could flee persecution. Haunted. This one looks crazy; compare:
![Image](https://gcdn.emol.cl/hombres/files/2015/05/barba.jpg)
Would that portrait be mocking a previous ruler? Presumably, Satyrus I c.385 BC. Astute readers will note that I almost never fail to point out a Conan/Schwarzenegger link, particularly where current events neatly intersect the horrifying past or something Scythian-flavored.
![Image](https://www.moviehousememories.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Conan-the-Barbarian-1982-featured.jpg)