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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
"I'm standing in front of the very coin that shows the idealised Alexander, struck forty years or more after his death by his successor Lysimachus, in beautiful silver." (Robin Lane Fox)
"I think the nearest we've had in the modern world to the spread of Alexander's portrait in the Hellenised world . . . I suppose it's Napoleon, where busts of Napoleon were all over Europe. Then you have to come through to the dictators, I suppose - Hitler and Mussolini." (Andrew Marr)
I'm going to China soon, and I've just got back from my local bank, where I was changing sterling for Yuan. And what struck me most, as the red notes were being counted out, was that almost every one of them has on it the portrait of Chairman Mao. It's ironic isn't it, that this spectacularly successful capitalist economy carries on its currency the portrait of a dead Communist revolutionary? We all know why: Mao reminds the Chinese people of the heroic achievements of the Communist Party, which is still in power. He stands for the recovery of Chinese unity at home and prestige abroad, and every Chinese government wants to be seen as the inheritor of his authority. Of course this kind of appropriation of the past, this kind of exploitation of an image, is nothing new. In the world of high politics, it's been around for thousands of years, and what's happening today to Mao's image on the Chinese currency was happening over two thousand years ago to the image of another great ruler.
Today's object is one of the earliest coins that we know with the image of a leader on it - it's from around 2,300 years ago and it carries the head of the most glamorised military ruler of his age - and possibly of all time - Alexander the Great.
He's on a coin about an inch and a half (3.8 cm) in diameter, so slightly larger than a two penny piece.
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