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The identity of the female depicted on Greek period Corinthian coins has often been contested. A decisive case can be argued that the figure is Athena and the iconography depicted by the Corinthian state centered around the Bellerophon myth and its core elements: Bellerophon, Pegasos, Peirene, and Athena. The implications of accepting that Corinth’s iconographic program was cohesively designed to represent this myth reach well beyond this polis. Corinth founded many colonies and some, like Ambracia, replicated the mother city’s iconography while others did not. Likewise, Amphilochian Argos, which was not a colony of Corinth, used this iconography. In this paper, we affirm the iconographic program used on Corinthian issues and examine which city-states adopted it. We argue that, in some cases, economic assimilation played a larger role than local identity in choosing the issues produced, a facet of numismatic production underplayed in discussions of identity construction.
