Der Greif als Parasemon von Assos

Abstract

If you want to identify the parasemon of Assos, the first thing you look at is the city’s coinage. The silver and bronze coins from the late Archaic to the Roman imperial period offer a broad basis of depictions with which the city represented itself. When examining the coin types, the observer frequently encounters the griffin. However, other motifs also appear, some of which replace the griffin and some of which are combined with it. In order to determine the parasemon of Assos, this work analyses the development of the coin images in the course of the history of the polis. In a next step, the results are compared with the relief-decorated market weights of the city, which, as further instrumenta publica, allow conclusions to be drawn about the official symbol of Assos. The eight known market weights are collected in this work for the first time. Since parasema always have identity-promoting characteristics, the last part of this work is devoted to the question of the meaning of the griffin for the city.