obv. Head of Seleukos I right, wearing helmet covered with panther skin and adorned with bull′s ears and horns, panther skin tied around neck rev. Nikè standing right, wearing peplos, crowning with wreath military trophy set on sapling tree, from which branch sprouts near base, consisting Macedonian arms shield, greaves and helmet, ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ at right, ΣΕΛΕΥΚΟΥ at left AP in lower left field, AΠ monogram to right, facing head of Helios bust between.
The obverse of this tetradrachm we see a bust of a hero, assimilating King Seleukos I, the deified Alexander the Great and the god Dionysos. He wears a helmet covered with panther skin and adorned with a bull′s horns and ear. All of these are attributes of Dionysus, the god of wine but also of eternal life, who rode about on a panther and could transform himself into a bull. According to myth, Dionysus conquered India through his mysterious power thus Alexander, who conquered parts of India by force of arms, could be seen as a second Dionysus. The coin type is yet more complex, because the issuer of this coin, Seleukos I, had repeated Alexander′s exploit of campaigning in western India. Thus he could claim to be a third Dionysus and a second Alexander, and this is undoubtedly implied by the heroic image.
Depicted on the reverse is Nike, the winged goddess of victory, crowning a trophy of arms. After a battle, the victors gathered arms from their fallen foes and attached them to a tree trunk to form a quasi-human figure. This trophy became the god of the battlefield, to which prayers of thanksgiving were offered. In this case the trophy probably alludes to the Battle of Ipsus (301 BC), in which Seleukos secured his kingdom with the aid of the war elephants he had acquired through his Indian campaign.
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