Bret Devereaux

For those playing along at home, because Greece in the Archaic and Classical period (when coinage was introduced to there from Anatolia) was split into a lot of little states, each state minted its own coins (on more-or-less similar weight standards) with their state emblem.

Athens had its owl (for Athena), Aegina a turtle, Thebes a Boeotian shield, Thera had dolphins. Little Silinus on Sicily had wheat (it was good farm country) and so on.

A lot of coins also draw on mythological events associated with the cities. Symphalos' coins had Heracles on one side and the famous Stmphalian bird on the other. Syracuse had Arethusa - a nymph (a type of minor goddess) famous to the city - on their coins.

The variety is really spectacular and also a great and fun way to illustrate visually how fragmented Greece was. That variety begins to decline a fair bit into the Hellenistic period, as the mass-mintings of the great kingdoms (with boring 'Here is our king' obverses)...

...overwhelm the little polis mintings. That's not to say Hellenistic coins aren't also cool (they are cool), but that the geographic variety goes way down (replaced by more chronological variety as the coins become an important tool of royal propaganda...