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With irresistible force, huge wealth and enormous charisma, it’s no wonder that Alexander became a legend, seeming to be more than mortal, literally superhuman. In one of his early campaigns into Egypt, he visited the oracle of the god Ammon, which named him not just the rightful pharaoh, but a god. He left the oracle with the title ‘son of Zeus-Ammon’, which explains the characteristic ram’s horns in images of him like the one on our coin. He was received by many of the conquered peoples as though he were a living god, but it’s not altogether clear whether he actually believed himself to be one. Robin Lane Fox suggests he saw himself more as the son of god:

He certainly believed he was the son of Zeus, [that] in some sense, Zeus had entered into his begetting, a story possibly told to him by his mother Olympias herself, though he is, in earthly terms, the son of the great king Philip. He is honoured as a god, spontaneously, by some of the cities in his empire, and he is not displeased to receive honours equal to the gods. But he knows he’s mortal.

Alexander conquered an empire of more than two million square miles and founded many cities in his name, the most famous being Alexandria in Egypt. Although nearly every large museum in Europe has an image of Alexander in its collection, they are not consistent and there’s no way of knowing whether he looked like any of them. It was only after Alexander’s death in 323 BC that an agreed, idealized image, constructed for public consumption, came into being – and that’s the image found on our coin. The reverse of the coin reveals that this is not Alexander’s coin at all – he’s making a posthumous guest appearance in somebody else’s political drama.

The other side of the coin shows the goddess Athena Nikephoros, bringer of victory, carrying her spear and shield. She is the divine patroness of Greeks and a goddess of war. But it’s not Alexander that she’s favouring, because the Greek letters beside her tell us that this is the coin of King Lysimachus. Lysimachus had been one of Alexander’s generals and companions. He ruled Thrace from Alexander’s death until his own death in 281 BC. Lysimachus didn’t mint a coin that showed himself. He decided instead to appropriate the glory and the authority of his predecessor. This is image manipulation – almost identity theft – on a heroic scale.

Alexander died in his early thirties, and his empire quickly disintegrated into a confusion of shifting territories under competing warlords – Lysimachus was just one of them. All of the warlords claimed that they were the true heirs of Alexander, and many of them minted coins with his image on them to prove it. This was a struggle fought out not just on the battlefield but on the currency. It’s a textbook early example of a timeless political ploy: harnessing the authority and the glamour of a great leader of the past to boost yourself in the present.

Dead reputations are usually more stable and more manageable than living ones. Since the Second World War, for example, Churchill and de Gaulle have been claimed by British and French political leaders of all hues when it suited the day’s agenda. But in democratic societies, this is a high-risk strategy, as the political commentator and broadcaster Andrew Marr points out:

The more democratic a culture is, the harder it is to appropriate a previous leader. It’s very interesting at the moment to see the revival of Stalin as an admired figure in Putin’s Russia, having been knocked down as a bloodthirsty tyrant before. So the possibility of taking a figure from the past is always open, but the more conversational, the more confrontational, more democratic, the more argumentative a political culture is, the harder it is. You can see this in the case of Churchill, because there are still lots and lots of people who know a great deal about what Churchill thought and said. Any mainstream party which tried to say ‘we are the party of Churchill’ would get into trouble because Churchill changed his mind so much