CHAPTER THREE

The Gold Colossus

Novelty Numismatics

On July 18, 1867, a golden “monster” migrated from its home under the armpit of a murderer into a royal new residence in Paris.¹ That change of address is one of the most sensational stories in the annals of numismatics. Taking its place among the rarest treasures of the Bibliothèque Impériale (now the Bibliothèque Nationale), this huge coin became known as the Eucratidion in honor of the ancient king displayed on one side, with his name and titles wrapped around an image of the galloping Greek-hero twins, the Dioscuri, on the other (fig. 10). Weighing 169.2 grams and spanning the palm of a man's hand, it is the largest gold coin ever minted in the ancient world. Nothing more novel can be found in any numismatic collection on Earth, and the study of this piece has taken on a life of its own.

The new custodian of this gold colossus, Pierre-Marie Anatole Chabouillet (1814–99), displayed it prominently in the Cabinet des Médailles of his sovereign, Louis Napoleon III. The purchase of the Eucratidion for the incredible sum of thirty thousand francs had been specially (and, it seems, speedily) authorized by the minister of public instruction, the historian Victor Duruy. In fact, the smitten Duruy later featured the coin in his multivolume History of Rome. (See plate 2.) Officially, Anatole Chabouillet claimed to have no precise knowledge of where or how this trophy had been found. He marveled that so grand a medallion managed through some unbelievable series of fortuitous circumstances (“par un concours inouï de circumstances favorables”) to survive at all.² He could only wonder whether it had been found in Merv, around some small village in Turkestan, somewhere near Persia, or even in Persia itself.³ Chabouillet's musings may appear to be the first and final word on the matter, but a dramatic account of the coin's discovery eventually appeared a dozen years later in the pages of the New York Times. That story connected the Eucratidion to the travels of a cold-blooded killer.

Figure 10. The Eucratidion, largest of all gold coins from the ancient world, minted by Eucratides the Great.

The 1879 Times article was filed under the unassuming title “A Coin of Eucratides.”⁴ There the anonymous reporter tells “the true story of the rarest of all coins,” based on the personal recollections of an informant identified cryptically as “a French gentleman, an expert of the British Museum.” In July 1867, that gentleman reportedly dined in London with General Charles Richard Fox (1796–1873), a wealthy collector and prominent member of the Royal Numismatic Society. During the dinner at Fox's Kensington mansion, the French expert learned of a “queer kind of fellow” from Bukhara who was wandering about the antiquities shops of London trying to sell a huge gold coin. The incredible size of the coin so amazed some of the London dealers that they had instinctively dismissed it as a forgery. “Just think of it,” the French expert was told, “the shabby-looking fellow who was hawking the coin around had the impertinence to ask £5,000 for it!”

The dinner guest resolved at once to see this “numismatical monstrosity” for himself. General Fox, sympathizing with the expert's “fit of numismatic fever,” allowed the man to quit his table and thus begin the quest of a lifetime. The excited French expert raced by cab from Kensington to Islington, where itinerant foreigners were known to congregate. A trail of inquiries soon led him to the miserable lodgings of the traveler he sought, a man said to have “black, snaky eyes” and hands like talons. Using the lodger's landlord as an interpreter, the expert asked to see the Bukharan's big gold coin. The odd little man obliged with an unusual striptease, removing in turn “his queerly-cut coat, next his embroidered waistcoat, then his waist-band, next his shirt,” until, half-naked, he pulled from under his armpit “a dirty, sweat-begrimed leather case.” This pouch the traveler dramatically opened to reveal the treasure inside:

In an instant the eyes of the expert were dazzled with that peculiar soft yellow sheen which only antique gold gives forth. It was indeed a prize. One glance alone was sufficient to show that it was a grand medallion, a unique coin, the chiefest, the rarest in the world.

As the expert labored to conceal his emotions from the “wily Oriental,” the latter recounted through the interpreter a remarkable story of gold, greed, and gore. He explained that he and six compatriots had discovered the coin:

We quarreled over it. That was natural. It was worth a fight. We fell on one another with knives and daggers. After a while, for it was hot work, five of the men rolled dead in the dust.

The two survivors of this killing spree made a pact that one of them would smuggle the prize, safely lodged under his armpit, to find a rich buyer in Europe.

Feigning indifference, the French expert lit a cigarette and examined the coin dismissively. Although secretly “wild with joy,” the prospective buyer casually brushed aside the seller's demand for five thousand pounds and made a cool counteroffer:

I tell you what I will do. I will give you, right now, my check for £1,000 for the piece. If the coin is not mine in twenty minutes I shall offer you £800 for it, and so on until I get to £500. If you don't close with me tonight, tomorrow I will not take it at any price.

The buyer smoked, and the seller sulked, for the full twenty minutes, when suddenly the man from Bukhara snatched the check and handed over the Eucratidion. That night the expert never closed his eyes, so excited was he to possess safely under his pillow the most expensive coin in the world. Even at the cost of five lives and a small fortune, he firmly believed that the coin was a bargain “even had fifty or one hundred lives been sacrificed” for it. As quickly as possible, the patriotic French buyer carried his treasure to Paris. Emperor Louis Napoleon III took an interest in it, as did the minister of public instruction. Through the agency of a dealer named Feuardent, French officials purchased the Eucratidion for thirty thousand francs (20% more than the expert had paid for it in London). The coin thus took residence in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Impériale in Paris, where it remains today, having first traveled across two continents under the armpit of a self-professed murderer.

That, at least, is the famous story long entrenched in numismatic lore.⁵ Can a single word of it be true? Some scholars have naturally condemned this melodramatic account as an outright fabrication.⁶ Only recently has anyone sought to investigate the claims made by the anonymous source behind it.⁷ That attempt focused on General Fox, an avid collector with deep pockets who was a Francophile with residences in both London (site of the infamous dinner) and Paris (where the coin was hastened). The theory is that Fox actually bought the Eucratidion. He allegedly steered the French expert to the seller with instructions to verify the coin's authenticity. That being done, it was Fox's own cash that finalized the deal. Afterward, Fox and his expert friend took the gold prize to Paris and sold it. This interesting reconstruction, however, does not take into account a number of relevant newspaper reports and other publications that fill out the story of a coin still appreciated primarily for its novelty.⁸

General Fox played only a minor role in the affair and most certainly was not the source for the original newspaper account, which appeared six years after his death. We can now state that the man at the center of events was in fact the French expert, Gaston L. Feuardent (1843–93; fig. 11), son of the Feuardent mentioned in the newspaper account.⁹ The elder Feuardent (1819–1907), named Félix, was a successful antiquities dealer and partner in the firm of Rollin et Feuardent in Paris, which sold the Eucratidion to the Bibliothèque Impériale. The firm had opened a London branch in 1867, represented by the son, Gaston.¹⁰ This younger Feuardent became quite active in London numismatic circles and procured many items for the collections of the British Museum, hence his description as “an expert of the British Museum.” He was a member of the London Numismatic Society and knew well its other members, including General Fox. His place at Fox's table, his reaction to the news of the great gold coin, his ability to purchase it, and his immediate conveyance of the prize to the firm's Paris offices all make perfect sense of the newspaper story.

Gaston Feuardent's decision to relate his adventure to the New York Times can also be easily explained. In 1876, Gaston moved to New York City, where he formed a very active relationship with the staff of the Times. He was frequently consulted by the newspaper on all manner of antiquarian subjects, from rare coins to a huge sword alleged to have fallen in a fireball from the heavens.¹¹ He acted soberly as the paper's debunker in chief, discrediting hoaxes and forgeries of various kinds. In fact, his rigid no-nonsense nature embroiled him in one of the most famous dustups of the day—the astonishing Cesnola affair.¹² This very public case shows just how much Gaston Feuardent jealously guarded his widespread reputation as a disciplined expert. In 1880, Gaston created a stir by vigorously challenging the authenticity of a collection of Cypriot antiquities sold by General Luigi Palma di Cesnola to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.¹³ Tempers flared and great egos clashed on the battlefields of the press and the courts. The ensuing vitriol seriously strained relations between, on the one hand, the Metropolitan Museum and its first director (none other than Cesnola himself) and, on the other, the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society (ANAS) and one of its most prominent members, Gaston Feuardent. With its own reputation on the line against that of the Metropolitan, the ANAS prudently investigated Gaston's reliability, focusing on his record of professionalism and even his “moral fiber.”¹⁴ The result was a resounding vote of confidence, publicly expressed in a resolution appearing in the New York Times that lauded Feuardent's “un-selfish devotion to the truth.”¹⁵ Whether or not such circumstances so confirm the habitual trustworthiness of the man that we may believe everything he reported about the Eucratidion, at least we now know that it was he who bought the coin and conveyed it to France in July 1867.

Figure 11. Gaston L. Feuardent, the French numismatist who procured the Eucratidion and sold it to Louis Napoleon.

Gaston Feuardent actually reinforced his account a few years later in his “Peculiar History of the Most Valuable Coin Known to Numismatists,” a newspaper story that has heretofore escaped scholarly attention.¹⁶ Interviewed by the New York correspondent of the Chicago Daily in December 1882, Gaston is described as “the Nemesis of Di Cesnola.” He is credited as the only real “numismatician” in America, a man “so skilled in knowledge of coins, in classical archaeology, and in antiquarian lore of all sorts that others are scarcely to be mentioned in comparison.” In the course of answering the reporter's questions about coins in general, Gaston Feuardent made the following statement:

I, myself, sold to Louis Napoleon the most valuable coin in the world. When I first heard of this I was at dinner with some gentlemen in London. One of them told about a ragged stroller who had that day offered to sell to him a splendid gold coin from Central Asia nearly as large as the palm of his hand. He sent him off as a mountebank and swindler. The description of the coin fired my imagination in a way that all collectors will understand. I hastily excused myself, called a cab, and went out to the suburbs, to a wretched quarter where I knew these Indian traders were wont to congregate. I searched some hours before I found the man from Bokhara, and got him out of his squalid bed. We went into a room alone, and there, removing his outer clothing, the tawny man drew from his arm-pit a sweaty bag, and from the bag he brought forth the most magnificent coin I had ever seen. It was obviously A GENUINE ANTIQUE stamped by King Eucratides of India, one of the successors of Alexander the Great. I was much excited, but strove to appear cool. On the obverse was an engraved head of the King, on the reverse a fine relief of Castor and Pollux [the Dioscuri]. It bore date about 185 B.C. [sic] He said the coin had at first been found by seven men, but they got into a deadly feud over it, and five were slain. He and a friend were the only survivors. He put an extravagant price on it, but I refused to pay it. At last I offered him £1,000—about $5,000—and gave him only ten minutes to consider the proposition. After that I told him I should take off $100 each minute from my offer. Before the ten minutes were up the coin was mine. I carried it to the Emperor, Napoleon. He offered me $6,000 for it, and I accepted it as a command that so rare a treasure should never leave France. It may now be seen in Paris among the antique trophies, honored by being placed in a case all by itself beneath the eye of the sentinel. It is the finest coin in the world.

In almost every respect, this version tallies with Gaston's earlier account in the New York Times. The only notable differences are the absence of the interpreter and the time allotted the Bukharan seller to accept the offer of £1,000. Again, Feuardent credits Fox with no active role in the proceedings, and none need be imagined. The French expert seems certain of these events, and he clearly enjoyed recounting to all and sundry this greatest adventure of his life. His associations with the press of nineteenth-century America made the Eucratidion the most famous novelty in ancient numismatics.

We may go further than Feuardent's recollections in U.S. newspapers. The earliest known report of the huge gold Eucratides coin actually appears in the published diary of Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff (1829–1906). Sir Mountstuart recorded on July 1, 1867, that he “saw the great gold coin of Eucratides” at a meeting of the Council of the Asiatic Society.¹⁷ This viewing of the Eucratidion must have taken place just days before the July dinner at which Gaston Feuardent learned of the piece, for the coin was settled into Paris's Bibliothèque Impériale by July 18. The diarist, who was indeed a council member of the Asiatic Society, correctly describes the coin as “weighing about twenty of our sovereigns.” He adds:

This very remarkable piece was brought from Bokhara by a Jew, who, on his first arrival in Paris, knowing that the West was rich and fond of curious objects, modestly demanded a million of francs for it. No one being willing to go into the transaction at that figure, he came to London, and entered into negotiations with the British Museum. Of course people there were charmed with it, and they soon began to discuss the question of price. “What,” said the Jew, “is its intrinsic value?” So much, they replied. “When was it struck?” he then asked. About such and such a year, was the answer. “Well,” rejoined the Jew, “I will be satisfied with interest at 5 percent from that date.”

These scribblings unfortunately intensify the jingoistic tone detectable in Gaston Feuardent's reminisces: the wily, sinister, shabby Oriental with talon hands and snaky eyes who is bested by the cool French expert; the greedy Bukharan Jew totaling up two thousand years' interest on an ancient coin.¹⁸ Sir Mountstuart's final remarks complete the story:

After a good deal of bargaining, it was ultimately bought by Feuardent for, I have heard, £1,100, and it passed to the Imperial Library for, I believe, £1,300.

The diarist is here correct in identifying Feuardent (and not Fox) as the owner of the coin, although off a bit on the sums paid and received (£100 in each case). Nothing in his last sentence could Sir Mountstuart have known on July 1, so this must be a later elaboration for the published version of the diary.

The next known mention of the coin can be found in a letter of Major General Alexander Cunningham written to Colonel Charles Seton Guthrie. These men, members of the Royal Engineers, shared a keen interest in ancient coins, a passion that both officers nurtured during their years of service in India. An extract from Cunningham's letter, printed in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, reads:¹⁹

But what is a double gold-mohur compared to the great gold Eucratides which has just been brought from Bokhara by Aga Zebalun Bokhari? It is 2½ inches in diameter, and weighs ten staters, or eleven guineas? It has the usual helmeted head on one side, with the horsemen and inscription on the reverse. The owner has refused 700£ for it. It is genuine—and beats all the Greek coins hitherto discovered.

Since this letter reached Colonel Guthrie in India and was then passed along to Arthur Grote of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in time for publication in the November 1 issue of its journal, it must have been composed much earlier.²⁰ Several points in the letter are noteworthy. Cunningham names the foreigner from Bukhara, insists that the coin is authentic, and knows of at least one unsuccessful bid for the piece. These details square nicely with Gaston Feuardent's account published twelve years later, and with Mountstuart Duff's reference to a Bukharan seller.²¹ Yet, Cunningham describes the coin in terms that do not match the Eucratidion seen by Mountstuart and sold to the Cabinet des Médailles; Cunningham reports a coin that is half the weight but a quarter-inch larger. Are these careless errors, or the dimensions of a different specimen altogether?

Hyde Clarke, a numismatist who traveled in the same circles as Gaston Feuardent, wondered the same thing about Cunningham's report.²² When a copy of Cunningham's letter appeared in the London Athenaeum on March 21, 1868, Clarke responded for the very next issue (March 28). The journal reported:

Last week we spoke of a very remarkable gold coin, a great gold Eucratides. “The first gold Eucratides,” writes Mr. Hyde Clarke, “came into the possession of M. Svoboda, of Bagdad, and after being offered to the British Museum, was sold to the Imperial Museum at Paris for 30,000 francs, or 1,200£. Is this the same as that described by General A. Cunningham? M. Svoboda has now on hand a silver Eucratides of the same size.”

Had two large gold Eucratides coins, one a twenty-stater and the other a ten-stater, crossed paths on the London market in 1867? The existence of two genuine variants of the Eucratidion seems very unlikely, and Cunningham's own numismatic research makes the existence of two a remote possibility at best. In an article published about Eucratides' coins in 1869, Cunningham lists all known specimens in gold, silver, and bronze; he references the twenty-stater piece and makes no mention of any other variety in gold.²³ By this time, then, the famed numismatist had corrected his earlier confusion about the size of the coin he labels “Unique, from Bokhara.” Indeed, Cunningham's original uncertainty about the coin's weight can be seen in the question mark he placed in the letter: “It…weighs ten staters, or eleven guineas?” In all quotations of that sentence in later journals and newspapers, editors have replaced the original question mark with an exclamation point, as if Cunningham were emphatic rather than unsure about the coin's size.²⁴ We may assume that General Cunningham had seen (or heard of) the same coin mentioned in Mountstuart Duff's diary, namely the unique twenty-stater Eucratidion.

Hyde Clarke's remarks to the Athenaeum do include two odd new bits of information. First, he avers that the Eucratidion was at some time owned by a Mr. Svoboda of Baghdad. Up to this point, all references to the seller identify him as a man from Bukhara, perhaps named Aga Zebalun Bokhari; the buyer, Gaston Feuardent, later confirmed this provenance. The latter's version of events has no place for Svoboda anywhere in the coin's history from its first discovery to its final disposition in the Bibliothèque Impériale. Is Hyde Clarke therefore wrong on this point? The answer to this question may rest upon his other curious revelation: the existence of a large silver Eucratides coin, also in the possession of Mr. Svoboda. This detail raises the very real possibility that Svoboda was trafficking in gold and silver imitations of the original Eucratidion. This practice often follows the sale of a sensational coin.²⁵ In fact, by the early twentieth century there were at least a half-dozen gold and silver imitations of the genuine Eucratidion, and twice that number are known today. Svoboda's “silver Eucratides of the same size” may have been one of the two examples known from casts that are kept in the cabinets of the British Museum.²⁶ In 1901, one of these silver imitations was owned by Professor Torrey, surely Charles Cutler Torrey (1863–1956), who later wrote a book about coins from Bukhara.²⁷ This specimen was said to weigh 1,014 grains (about 66 grams, the size of four large silver tetradrachms); it has a secondary symbol on the reverse that resembles an elaborate conical headdress (fig. 12). This symbol is actually a copy of one of the caps worn by the Dioscuri, which are displayed separately on Eucratides' obols and small square bronzes.²⁸ The other huge silver imitation, attributed to “Baldwin 1954” according to the museum identification ticket, carries a rudimentary form of this ancillary symbol. This suggests that the Baldwin specimen is a secondary derivative of the Torrey imitation.

Figure 12. The elaborate secondary symbol, representing one of the caps of the Dioscuri, found on some forgeries of the Eucratidion.

Copies in gold range in weight from three to nineteen staters. Solid-gold varieties include two auctioned from the collection of Joseph Avent in November 1897 (sold as fakes for about £20 each).²⁹ Another at the time was owned by Dr. Guerson da Cunha, purchased as genuine for over £600 but later condemned as a forgery.³⁰ Two imitations are associated with the famous American financier John Pierpont Morgan. One was auctioned from his collection in 1953; the other now lies in the forgery trays of the American Numismatic Society.³¹ A gold imitation owned by Syed Ali Bilgrame passed through the British Museum in 1902 and again in 1923.³² A fifteen-stater copy appeared in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1985–86.³³ This last example shows the same elaborate ancillary symbol of the Dioscuri cap as seen on the silver coin owned by Professor Torrey. It does not seem, however, that the forgers quite understood the headdress they were copying, since the horsemen themselves do not wear them. Instead, the engraved Dioscuri have rays prominently radiating from their heads. A gold-plated specimen in the British Museum that belonged to a Mrs. Thornton in 1909 captures this same effect; the note with the coin in the forgery trays actually describes the Dioscuri as wearing “Indian feather headdress.”³⁴ This gilded piece, like the silver Baldwin example, bears the rudimentary version of the ancillary symbol (and a simplified monogram), so that it too is clearly a later derivative—a copy of a copy. All these take us back to the comment by Hyde Clarke, and the strong possibility that imitations in gold and silver were circulating soon after the sale of the original coin to Gaston Feuardent.

The early proliferation of Eucratidion knockoffs prompted one numismatist to ask: “Are they concoctions altogether, the work of some skilful Persian goldsmith? Or does there exist more than one genuine piece, from which the da Cunha and Avent examples have been imitated?”³⁵ The existence of a second genuine twenty-stater Eucratides has long been rumored but never confirmed.³⁶ As for the existence of “some skilful Persian goldsmith,” we should probably look farther east for the manufacturer of most of these fakes, since so many have derived from collections formed in India.³⁷ Meanwhile, the fame of the specimen in Paris, which had inspired the forgeries, continued to grow year by year. The Eucratidion, after all, had become the most notable numismatic celebrity in the world thanks to its extraordinary size and price.³⁸ In nearly every reference to it, this “monster” was regarded for its novelty rather than for anything it might contribute to framework numismatics.

Similar stories swirl around Eucratides' other gold issues. The first appearance of a normal-sized Eucratides gold coin, a battered stater, happened to be on the finger of an Afghan army officer, where it apparently caught the attention of an avid British collector named Charles Strutt.³⁹ The latter purchased the artifact and chiseled it free of the ring to which it had been attached. Though badly scarred, the coin became a great prize for successive owners.⁴⁰ Weighing 8.53 grams, this piece preserves the same basic features as its gigantic cousin, though with a different monogram The obverse portrait of Eucratides has been mashed, perhaps during its long service as a signet ring, and the Dioscuri reverse suffers a deep cut from end to end. (See chap. 9, below.) The edges of the coin are misshapen, marked here and there by the bite of pliers used in removing the ring. More than once, this marred novelty made its way through Sotheby's as the stater meandered through some of the finest collections in Europe and America.⁴¹

By the end of the nineteenth century, Bactrian studies finally had the benefit of an impressive corpus of ancient coins. Some finds had fulfilled the first ambitions of checklist numismatics; a few extraordinary pieces mesmerized the aficionados of novelty numismatics, and most of the coins served the broader interests of framework numismatics. By 1888, the sesquicentennial of Bayer's Historia Regni Graecorum Bactriani, what might be called the heroic age of numismatic exploration in Central Asia had filled public and private coin cabinets on several continents. The single specimen of Eucratides known to Bayer could be compared to a growing array of this king's mintages in gold, silver, and bronze. The largest accumulation of Eucratides' coins resided at that time in the British Museum, which had managed to absorb much of the material from the pioneering collectors Prinsep, Masson, Court, and especially Sir Alexander Cunningham. Thus, to the sixty-five Eucratides specimens published by the British Museum in 1886 (32 silver, 33 bronze), Cunningham's coins eventually brought that number to well above a hundred.⁴² Dozens more specimens could be studied elsewhere in France, Britain, Russia, and India, although there existed as yet no major Bactrian collections in the United States.⁴³

Cataloguing major collections like that in the British Museum laid the foundations for a new phase of numismatic studies. Scholars now had a burgeoning framework that invited them to build more complex historical narratives. The use of photography, beginning in 1874, replaced less reliable line drawings, so that even non-numismatists closeted in their libraries might consult these catalogues and dare to write histories based upon them. In their hands, the money of ancient Bactria was made to talk under sometimes torturous interrogation.