Echedemos

[5] Echedemos was the leader of the Athenian embassy (princeps legationis eorum) that mediated in a conflict between Aetolians and Romans in 190 BC.

[13] In the second poem, in which Echedemos has grown up, he is given a much more elaborate set of compliments:[14] Child of Leto, son of Zeus the great, who utterest oracles toall men, thou art lord of the sea-girt height of Delos; but thelord of the land of Cecrops is Echedemus, a second AtticPhoebus, whom soft-haired Love lit with lovely bloom.

[15] Some time in the second century BC Athens have established a new iconography of coinage, with obverse featuring a head of Athena and reverse showing an owl with additional images, symbols and inscriptions identifying, among other things, the people responsible for minting the coins.

[18][19] The office of the mint master was given almost exclusively to members of the Athenian aristocracy, conferring the almost royal honour to place one's name and emblem on the city's coins.

[20] Below the monogram, the coins bear a small device of a head or bust of Helios, with a crown of rays above seemingly rich curly voluminous hair.

[46] Remarkably, two ancient partial impressions of this (or a very similar) ring have been excavated in Aetolian Kallipolis,[47][48] near modern Lidoriki in Greece.

Athens partly depended in its grain supply on the colonies of the Black Sea, and Echedemos could have sent the ring as a present to a king, a dignitary or even a merchant in the area during trade negotiations.

[56] Alternatively, it could travel back home with mercenaries of the northern Black Sea coast, who are known to have served all over Hellenistic world, even as far as Ptolemaic Egypt.

Other suggestions include: an uncertain, perhaps Bosporan, king;[58] a royal courtier,[23][59] possibly Hermeias, the chief minister of Seleucus III;[60] and, given the absence of any insignia, a private individual.