AE Unit 20.5mm 6.41g 12h
c. 180-150 BCE
Laffaille430 var. – Cop.- – Aulock6886 var. – RG.26 – BMC.- – HGCS. 7/629
0avers : Buste imberbe, juvénile et drapé de Dionysos (Bacchus) à droite, couronné de feuilles de vigne.
0revers : Le Centaure Chiron à droite, la tête de face, jouant de la lyre, sa tunique flottant derrière.
Lots of tourists to Paris come back with little Eiffel Towers or selfies in front of the Mona Lisa. I brought back this coin. I purchased it to fill out my collection of Bithynian kings, and also because it has a cool centaur on the reverse. These days we don’t have centaurs. Perhaps they were hunted to extinction, but I could imagine all sorts of issues today with voting rights, centaur discrimination, and accomodating centaur children in classrooms.
In real life, Prusias II was a bit of a prick. He had the tendency to backtrack on alliances, such as when he joined with Pergamon against the Kingdom of Pontos, then a number of years later invaded Pergamon (but failed).
He also tried to have his son of his first marriage murdered. His second wife had no fondness for Nikomedes II and convinced Prusias, who evidently had no read the history of his great-grandfather, to renounce him in favor of her own children. Prusias sent Nikomedes to Rome with the goal of murdering him, but the plot failed. Prusias had to renounce the kingship and was subsequently murdered.