If you are familiar with our TikTok, you know how much we enjoy nature. This coin story presents an iconic, treasured plant-life coin, perfect for the season of the dead.
Today our treasure is from the Ancient Greek Empire. The island of Sicily (now an autonomous region of Italy) was occupied by the Greeks beginning in the 8th to 7th century B.C.E. The empire minted coins to facilitate trade, and outsourced that responsibility to local mints whenever possible.
A Greek settlement on the southwest coast, between Tre Fontane and Porto Palo, in the region of modern Selinunte, Trepani, Sicily, had its own coinage. One coin, the silver Selinus Didrachm, featured a wild celery leaf (or parsley, but we’ll get to that in a minute).
It was a town symbol, kind of like France’s fleur-de-lis and the USA’s bald eagle. The Greeks honored the town name and local plant life, but they were also making a pun with this symbol.
In that culture, wild celery was heavily associated with death. It grew wild in the area, so its inclusion indicated the botany of the region and a play on the town name Selinus, because the wild celery was called selinon.
In Greek practice, wild celery was used as a grave-covering plant; the deceased were honored with crowns of wild celery, and it was connected to Hephaestus’ son, Kadmilos (or Cadmilus), an underworld deity. His myth explains the origin of wild celery. It was believed that the first wild celery plants sprouted from the blood he shed when his brothers killed him and cut off his head.
But wait, there’s more…
In the Iliad, the horses of the Myrmidon Cavalry ate celery and lotus in between battles. The symbolism reinforces their position as death dealers what modern people would call mercenaries for hire, or elite strike teams because wild celery and lotus are both associated with death.
Do you want to know more?
In the Odyssey, wild celery and violets grew at the entrance to Calypso’s cave, where Odysseus was trapped for seven years. The death she almost dealt was not physical, but a social death. If Odysseus never returned home, he couldn’t be remembered as a traditional Grecian hero. If no one wrote about him, he would disappear when the memory of him died.
About the parsley… Some professionals interpret the plant on the coin as parsley, while others believe it is wild celery. This is an ongoing debate. We see celery, but if new archeological evidence comes to light, we may change our minds.
This small silver coin, only 23mm across, carries cultural history. It holds stories and histories that ancient cultures told themselves. It is a pun about being stuck in a “nowhere” place at the edge of an empire where a warrior can only be forgotten. It records colonizer comedy at the expense of the colonized. Coins are touchstones connecting us to the past, and in this case, a plant helps tell the history.
Subscribe for more coin stories on Pendant and Ring.
Read more about coin collecting.
Leave a Reply