Speaker
Description
This paper is a summary of my master thesis in which I collected all the coins from the poleis of Corinth and Maroneia from the Archaic through to the Hellenistic periods. These cities chose the (winged) horse as a motif, so I compared the various representations with other poleis in the Mediterranean. The overall concept was to study the movement of the horse. Next to the usual canon of the “flying Pegasus” used in Corinth, and the “prancing horse” of Maroneia, there are also very interesting exceptions. Among them I was able to identify some postures of the horse which nowadays are called “dressage movements” which were described already by Xenophon (430/25–354 BC) in his work “On Horsemanship”. These coins illustrate how the horse could be captured in a significant moment of its movement or in its natural habitat, and show the further meaning of the animal in different regions of the Mediterranean.
