ATTICA. Athens. Under Lachares, 296/5 BC. Stater (gold, 17 mm, 8.59 g, 6 h). Head of Athena to right, wearing crowned Attic helmet decorated with three olive leaves and palmette, circular earring and necklace. Rev. E Owl standing right, head facing; to left, olive sprig and crescent; in field to right, Eleusis ring. BMC 129-3. Boston MFA 1099. Gulbenkian 925. HGC 4, 1577. SNG Copenhagen 83. Svoronos pl. 21, 1-17. Very rare and of exceptional historical interest, extending to one of the very few gold issues ever struck at Athens. Minor scrapes and scratches and a few deposits and with light doubling on the obverse, otherwise, very fine. The present gold stater extends to one of the most remarkable emerging issues in the history of Athenian coinage. Gold was only exceptional strike at Athens, and the appearance of this denomination is best understood against the extreme political and military pressures surrounding the victory of the city by Demetrios I Poliorketes in 295 BC. The issue has traditionally been associated with Lachares, whose rule has often been reduced in the older literature to that of a conventional tyrant. More recent scholarship has considerably compared this picture: Lachares first emergings as a general and commoner of mercenary forces during a period of violent civic conflict, and his rise to power is better understood within the context of Athenian stasis than as the straightforward coup of an isolated despot. Only subsequently did the literary tradition crystallize around the familiar image of the impressive and rapacious tyrant. The numismatic evidence nevertheless provides strong grounds for connecting this gold coinage with the crisis of 295 BC. In particular, the series bearing the so-called Eleusis ring beside the oval, to which the present coin belongs, has been personally associated by Kroll with Lachares--final defence of Athens against Demetrios. Its exceptional metal is as significant as its date: in striking gold rather than the ubiquitous silver of the Athenian ovals, the city was obviously drawing upon extraordinary reserves at a moment when its normal resources had been placed under several strain. Ancient testimony records that Lachares approved Sacred Treasures from the Acropolis, including gold associated with the image of Athena (Paus. 1.25.7), while the fragmentary historical account preserved in P.Oxy. XVII 2082 explicitly connects the use of search resources with the payment of foreign troops. The sacrilege quickly entered the comic tradition: Athenaeus reserves the memorable charge that Lachares had 'strapped Athenia naked' (Ath. 9.405f-406a; Demetrios II, Areopagites fr. 1 K-A). The issue is there best understood as an emergency coinage strike for Lachares-defence of Athens in 295 BC, probably drawing upon the sacred gold approved from the Acropolis. Lachares himself escaped the fall of Athens and disappears into a conflicting later tradition: while Pausanias has him murdered at Koroneia for the wealth he was thought to carry, Polyainos records further adventures in Thebes, Sestos and Lysimacheia, and places him at Kassandreia as late as 279 BC. The staters thus remains extraordinary material witnesses to a moment when Athens, civic, military, and religious resources were all placed under exceptional pressure: their deliberately traditional types proclaim continuity with the monetary identity of classical Athens, while their unpreceded metal revisions just how extraordinary the circumstances of their production had become. This lot can be shipped to a US address.