"Jason And The Argonauts" Collection?

An interesting ancients theme, which can encompass both Greek and Roman coins (since the Romans wholeheartedly adopted the legend of Jason as their own).

As I see it, there would be three subsets within the series:
- Coins depicting the Argonauts themselves;
- Coins depicting the people and entities the Argonauts encountered;
- Coins from the cities and places mentioned in the legend.

That last subset - the places - would be easiest to complete. Although the people and events of the myth are, well, mythical, the places mentioned actually existed, though for the most part the real-life places weren't as exciting and magical as the myth makes them out to be, and for most such places any direct references to the Jason myth are uncommon.

Most of the Argonauts are under-represented on coins. There are only a very few coins depicting Jason himself. Hercules is of course by far the easiest to obtain as half the cities in Greece issued coins with him on it at some point. The only other ones I can recall are Orpheus (on several coins) and the twins Castor and Pollux (very commonly depicted on Roman coins, less so on Greek coins).

As for the rest of the cast of characters, it's a mixed bag. The city of Cyzicus, with its link to the Jason story via the death of the king by that name, depicts coins featuring a creature with a woman's head and a bird's body; the literature sometimes describe this as a "siren", sometimes a "harpy"; either could in theory fit the image as both sirens and harpies are described as part-bird, part-woman monsters, but as the creature on the Cyzicus coins holds a fish, the siren hypothesis seems more accurate. This same bird-woman imagery of a siren appears on an early Roman Imperial denarius of Augustus. Other archaic-period Greek coins depict the Harpy as just a hideous face with wings attached to it. The six-armed Gegeines don't get featured on the coins at all.

Medea, despite her central role in the story, doesn't seem to have made an appearance on the coinage.

Found this...

https://ancientcoinage.org/other-no...-heroes.html

Those are the ones I was talking about when I mentioned the confusion; some references call that creature a "harpy", some a "siren". Both were traditionally depicted as half-woman-half-bird, but sirens are physically beautiful, while harpies are ugly, and this depiction does not "look ugly" by ancient Greek standards; "ugly things" normally have wild curly hair and stick their tongue out. And holding a fish also leans me more towards a siren (which lived by the ocean and presumably ate fish when no convenient sailors were available).

Re: Jason and the petasos; the petasos cap was almost always linked with the god Hermes / Mercury, so unless there's a very strong link otherwise connecting a petasos (or a mystery petasos-wearing portrait) with Jason, I'd assume it's Hermes, not Jason, that is being alluded to.