The Original
Coin of Fate

Its existence has never been conclusively established. No object held by a museum has been verified as the original Coin of Fate. No contemporary Lydian inscription identifies it by that name, and no surviving royal inventory records its creation. Yet scattered references discovered across different periods describe an object remarkably similar in purpose, origin, and appearance. Most lead back to the same place.

SARDIS.

Capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. And one of the places where coinage itself was born. Although many later collectors have assigned a “Heaven” and “Hell” related significance, the origin of the coin itself has no actual biblical or occult correlation affiliated with it.

THE SARDIS FRAGMENTS

The oldest account does not describe a king. It describes a father. The name most commonly translated from later copies is Theron, although no independent record of a man by that name connected with these events has been discovered. There is no record of him being wealthy. There is no record of him holding office.

There is no record of him being a soldier, priest, or nobleman. The surviving accounts describe him only as: a righteous man.

Theron reportedly lived with his wife and young son somewhere outside Sardis during the sixth century BCE. According to the account, a thief entered their home one night intending to steal silver. There is no evidence that the thief entered intending to harm anyone. But Theron’s son awakened.

The thief fled. During his escape, an oil lamp was overturned. The house caught fire. Theron and his wife survived. Their child did not. The thief was captured shortly afterward.

What followed became the central problem recorded in the surviving account.

The man had committed theft. That was certain. His actions had also caused the death of an innocent child. That was equally certain. But there was no evidence that he had intended to kill him. Theron therefore faced a question considerably more difficult than determining guilt.

He had to determine justice.

To punish the man only as a thief seemed to deny the consequence of his actions. To condemn him as a murderer required Theron to punish an intention that had never existed. For a man repeatedly described as righteous, neither answer appeared righteous.

THE FORGING

The account claims that Theron traveled into Sardis and sought the assistance of a metalworker. The identity of this smith has never been verified.

Later copies give several names. None can be connected conclusively with a known Lydian workshop. What follows is stranger.

Theron supposedly asked the smith to create a small object from precious metal. Not currency. Not jewelry. Something that could be cast from the hand and allowed to choose between two opposing judgments.

The metal described in the earliest surviving version appears to have contained both gold and silver. This detail was considered insignificant for centuries. It would later become important.

Two substances were then supposedly introduced during the forging. The first was blood preserved upon the cloth in which Theron’s dead son had been carried. The second was blood taken from the man whose actions had caused his death.

Whether blood was literally introduced into molten metal is impossible to establish. Some historians who have examined later versions believe the passage may describe a ritual performed during the forging rather than the physical composition of the object.

Whatever occurred, the two substances acquired names. Names repeated in accounts written centuries apart.

The Blood of True Innocence.

And:

The Blood of the Merciless.

The second phrase remains difficult to interpret. It may describe the thief. It may describe Theron should he choose vengeance. Or it may refer to the person who holds another man’s fate and chooses not to grant mercy.

The original meaning has been lost.

The smith then struck the object with two opposing faces. What appeared upon those faces is unknown. The surviving description is frustratingly vague.

One represented judgment.

The other represented mercy.

And Theron returned home carrying what translators would call: The Coin of Fate. 

THE FIRST CAST

When the time came to determine the thief’s punishment, Theron produced the object. One face would mean mercy. The other death. According to a later copy of the account, the prisoner understood what Theron intended to do and protested. The precise wording is almost certainly a later translation.

What happened next appears consistently throughout the surviving versions. Theron cast the coin. But it never struck the earth. While watching it turn through the air, Theron realized that he was hoping for one particular face. At that moment, he understood that the coin had already served its purpose.

Theron caught it. The result was never seen. When asked what the coin had decided, Theron reportedly answered:

“Nothing.” [translated]

He then rendered judgment himself. Strangely, that judgment does not survive. There is no verified record that the thief was executed. There is no verified record that he was spared. Theron disappears from the known account shortly afterward. The object does not.

THE KING OF LYDIA

Several decades later, an unusual object fitting portions of the description appears in traditions associated with the royal court at Sardis. By then Lydia was ruled by Croesus. How the object may have reached him is unknown. One account claims that Theron’s descendants surrendered it to satisfy a debt. Another claims that the story of Theron’s judgment became known throughout Sardis and the object was eventually presented to the king.

Neither account has been verified.

There is, however, no historical difficulty placing such an object in Sardis during the reign of Croesus. The city was his capital. And something remarkable happened there during approximately the same period. The Lydians changed money forever.

THE LION AND THE BULL

Before the reforms associated with Croesus, Lydia had already produced coins from electrum—a mixture of gold and silver. Croesus subsequently introduced a revolutionary monetary system. Instead of keeping the two precious metals together, Lydia began striking coins separately in pure gold and pure silver.

Both carried the same remarkable image: A lion and a bull confronting one another.

Real examples survive. They have been excavated. They have been catalogued. They remain in museum collections today. The lion-and-bull Croeseids are among the most recognizable surviving objects from ancient Lydia. Yet the exact meaning of the two animals has never been conclusively established. They may have been a royal emblem. They may represent traditional Near Eastern imagery. But another interpretation has persisted.

The lion and bull may represent gold and silver.

Two opposing elements.

Separated from what had once been one metal. Placed opposite one another. And struck onto a single coin. For centuries, no significance was attached to the similarity between these coins and the object described in the Sardis account. Then another artifact complicated the story.

THE TRANSITIONAL COIN

Among surviving Lydian coins is an extremely rare type made not from separated gold or silver; but from electrum. Gold and silver remain joined within it. And upon this coin appear the lion and bull. But they do not yet confront one another. They face away.

Some numismatic interpretations have proposed that this rare design belongs to the transition between Lydia’s earlier electrum currency and the later gold-and-silver coinage associated with Croesus.

If that interpretation is correct, the sequence becomes unusual. First: Gold and silver joined together.

• Then: Lion and bull joined upon the same electrum object, facing opposite directions.
• Finally: Gold separated from silver.
• And: Lion turned to confront bull.

There is no evidence that Theron’s Coin of Fate inspired this transformation. There is no record of Croesus ordering his engravers to reproduce symbols found upon an older object. There is not even sufficient evidence to establish what symbols appeared upon Theron’s coin. Yet the parallels have never been satisfactorily explained.

The object described in the Sardis account was supposedly made from gold and silver. It represented two opposing judgments. It later entered traditions associated with the court of Croesus. And sometime during this same period, the royal mint at Sardis began producing coins from gold and silver bearing two opposing creatures.

• Bird and goat.
• Air and earth.
• Gold and silver.
• Two forces.
• One object.

Coincidence remains the most reasonable explanation. But it is not the only one.

CROESUS

One later account claims Croesus kept the older object among his personal possessions rather than within the royal treasury. It was reportedly worth very little compared with the extraordinary wealth surrounding him. Yet Croesus supposedly considered it one of the most dangerous objects he possessed. Not because it could predict what would happen. Because it could reveal what its holder wanted to happen. The account attributes a peculiar name for it to the king:

“The coin that spends the man.” [translated]

There is no contemporary record verifying that Croesus ever used this phrase. There is also no verified evidence that he ever cast the object. History does record, however, that Croesus eventually faced a decision worthy of it. Whether to make war against Persia. Croesus famously sought supernatural guidance concerning the decision. He crossed into Persian territory. And the consequences were catastrophic. His kingdom fell.

Sardis was captured.

The age of independent Lydia ended. And its wealth passed into the hands of another king.

Cyrus the Great.

After the Persian conquest of Lydia in the mid-sixth century BCE, something remarkable occurred. The lion-and-bull coins did not disappear with Croesus.

The Persians continued minting them.

The kingdom that created them was gone. The king associated with them had been defeated. Yet the symbol survived. For decades, the Persian administration continued producing the familiar Lydian coinage at Sardis before it was eventually replaced by explicitly Persian designs.

If the Coin of Fate had truly been held among the possessions of Croesus, then the capture of Sardis provides the simplest explanation for what happened to it next.

It would have become Persian property.

No surviving Persian inventory has been verified as containing it.

No excavated object from the royal possessions of Cyrus has been conclusively identified as the Coin of Fate.

Fragments of Lydian script reportedly surrounded both images, although no complete transcription survives.

For centuries, historians dismissed these descriptions as later embellishments of the Sardis legend. The objection was reasonable. Neither image corresponded with the familiar royal coinage of Croesus.

Later archaeological evidence made the question less simple.

Early electrum coins from Lydia and neighboring regions are now known to have carried an extraordinary variety of symbols. Among the unidentified types recorded by numismatists is specifically a goat’s head. According to the oldest interpretation of the Sardis Account, however, the two images represented the same judgment that had confronted Theron. The goat represented death. The wings represented life. One condemned. One spared. For this reason, later collectors supposedly distinguished these objects from subsequent versions.

But after Sardis fell, references to the object in Lydia abruptly cease.

Later Discoveries

The trail disappears for nearly five centuries.

Then it appears again in Rome.

Among much later descriptions of objects said to have belonged to Gaius Julius Caesar is an unusual reference to an eastern coin or token that did not appear to have been used as money.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European collectors acquired enormous quantities of antiquities from Greece, Anatolia, Egypt, and the former territories of the Roman Empire.

At some point before the Second World War, an object matching the description of the Goat and Wings variant was reportedly held in a private European collection.

While there is no other coin in recorded history that has the same description or known purpose, it cannot be verified with absolute certainty that those accounts describe the same coin artifact, but it is highly likely.