Episode 3: Provenance traces the remarkable afterlife of the Naxos Tetradrachm by following the collectors who owned it over the past 250 years.

Part 3 redresses the balance of this traditionally male-dominated pursuit by highlighting some of the most significant women collectors, from royal figures and heiresses to leading women in the field today.

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Episode 3: Provenance traces the remarkable afterlife of the Naxos Tetradrachm by following the collectors who owned it over the past 250 years.

Part 2 moves into the nineteenth century, when coin collecting spread beyond courtly circles and became a fashionable “gentleman’s pastime,” particularly among the rising professional classes, from doctors to lawyers.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel @ancient_coin_collection and follow us on Instagram @ancientcoincollectionpodcast for more from the Ancient Coin Collection.

Episode 3: Provenance traces the remarkable afterlife of the Naxos Tetradrachm by following the collectors who owned it over the past 250 years.

In Part 1, we go back to the origins of coin collecting as the so-called “Hobby of Kings,” exploring how monarchs, princes, and aristocrats first assembled collections—and meeting a few of the more eccentric personalities along the way.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel @ancient_coin_collection and follow us on Instagram @ancientcoincollectionpodcast for more from the Ancient Coin Collection.

In our first season, Annabel Schooling interviews Dr Tim Wright about his book Travels with the Naxos Masterpiece, published by Spink in 2025. We learn that this is an 'object biography', telling a big story through a small object: a 17g silver coin minted around 460 BC in the Greek city of Naxos, Sicily. Through the lenses of art, history, provenance, economics and crime, Tim sheds light on the broader subject of Greek Numismatics (the collection and study of ancient coins).

The first episode, in two parts, examines the famous Naxos coin from an artistic perspective. By exploring the coin's subjects, style, composition and engraver, Tim starts to answer the question why some consider it a numismatic masterpiece. As we shall hear in subsequent episodes, the Naxos coin is so highly prized that it has taken pride of place in the world's great public and private collections, and hammers for eye-watering sums when one comes to auction.

What makes this coin so special, and what does that tell us about those who produced it and those who have collected it?