Athenian Owls, thick, heavy, high-relief silver coins minted more than 2,000 years ago, were arguably the most influential of all coins, and the Classical Owl tetradrachm, pictured above, is the most widely recognized ancient coin among the general public today
Owls were the first widely used international coin. They popularized the practice of putting a head on the obverse of a coin and a tail (animal) on the reverse. Owls were handled by Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Democritus, Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, and others whose thinking formed the very foundation of Western civilization. They remained thematically unchanged, Athena on the obverse, her owl on the reverse, for half a millennium, through great changes in the ancient world. Because of their centrality, they were known as "Owls" in ancient times as they are today despite many other ancient coins depicting owls in an equally prominent fashion. President Theodore Roosevelt used a Classical Owl as a pocket piece, which inspired him to order the redesign of U.S. coins early last century.
Like other great powers, Athens treated its money not only as a way of facilitating commerce and trade and projecting its image abroad but also as a way of making money. Athens earned seigniorage profits on each Owl minted, whether the source was freshly mined silver or the silver coins of other cities. The traders and merchants of other cities, in turn, liked Owls because of their easy exchangeability. Owls thus became the world's first great trade currency, and they were followed in this role by among others Alexander the Great tetradrachms and staters, Roman denarii, Spanish American pieces of eight, Dutch lion dollars, Austrian Maria Theresa thalers, and American dollars.7
The mythology depicted on Owls is equally interesting. Athena was goddess of both wisdom and warfare, combining within herself two qualities we find incompatible today but the ancients didn't, a telling difference between their world and ours. She was the patron goddess of Athens, one of the greatest cities of all time.
According to ancient Greek mythology, Athena was the daughter of Zeus and his first wife, Metis, whose name meant "wisdom." Metis warned Zeus that their first son would be more powerful than Zeus himself, which agitated Zeus so much that when Metis became pregnant he swallowed whole Metis and their unborn child. This gave him a headache, which he cured by splitting his head open with an axe. (Zeus may have been powerful but he wasn't necessarily smart.) From the wound came forth Athena, fully grown.
New Style…
The most noticeable change in the new tetradrachm is the fact that Athena now wears a helmet with three crests, emphasizing the fact that she was the goddess of war as well as wisdom. A mythological creature, which can be either Pegasus or a griffin, is to be found on the side of the helmet. A visor sits across her forehead, above which are portrayed horse’s heads in a frontal view. An earring dangles from her ear.
The clean simplicity of earlier owl reverses is gone. Athena’s owl now perches upon an amphora–a large, often ceramic vessel, used to transport and store a variety of products such as wine or olive oil–that serves as a symbol of Athen’s prowess in the olive oil trade. Inscriptions recording the date of issue and the city magistrate that produced the coins were also added.
The New Style Athenian tetradrachm was produced from approximately 164 BCE to about 42 BCE. In the year 42 BCE, Rome ordered a halt to silver coin production in Athens, perhaps to force the Athenians to use the silver Roman denarius.