It seems that the people of ancient Greece had a tremendous appreciation for artistic beauty. Indeed, the art objects produced back in those days are greatly admired by us, and constitute an important reason for our general interest in ancient Greek culture.

You may not be very interested in numismatics, but take a good look at a few ancient greek coins! These coins, from the classical period, are now about 2500 years old - yet they show a superb level of artistic skill.

The ancient Greeks must have been very proud of their coins. Typically, each city-state produced their own coinage; and one can imagine that the different cities were all aspiring to produce the most beautiful coins. In some cases, the artist designing the images on the coins were even allowed to put their names on them.

There is for instance some ancient Greek silver coins minted in the ancient Greek city of Syracuse which are signed by the artist “Eukledias”, his name appearing in tiny letters near the edge of the coin.

As the Mediterranian region was later dominated by the Roman empire, the Romans also produced many coins of great beauty. However, in my opinion none of the ancient Roman coins can quite match up to the freshness of the best Greek coins.