While a number of the women in this blog series covering Whitman Publishing’s 100 Greatest Women On Coins have a great story, author Ron Guth reminds readers right off the bat that this story is not like the others. Perhaps the most tragic and sad of all the other entries, we will take a look at a woman and her three daughters that proved their faith prevailed over everything.
#85 - Faith, Hope, Charity, and Mother Sophia
Known throughout religious art and history, Sophia was a mother who lived in the second century AD with three daughters: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The daughters were said to have gotten their names from one of the apostle Paul’s letters to the church at Corinth, I Corinthians 13;13, that read “But now abide faith, hope, and love…”. Sophia and her daughters lived in Italy under the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Devout Christians, they declared their faith during a time when Christians were being persecuted in Rome. Someone would find out and disclose this information to authorities.
Sent to Rome after being exposed, Sophia and her daughters would find out their fate. Starting with the oldest of the three daughters, each were tortured in front of each other in order to get them to rebuke their faith and worship the Roman goddess Artemis. They refused to do so, causing their torture to end in a beheading. Their mother, Sophia, was forced to watch all of this happen to her daughters as part of her punishment. She would then have to gather up their bodies and bury them on a hill outside of Rome. Staying beside their graves the entire time, she would end up dying herself three days later.
As mentioned before, Sophia and her three daughters are known throughout religious art and are thought of as icons. Their names are mentioned in Greek, Cyrillic, Latin, and English.
They appear on $2 rectangular coins issued by Niue in 2012 and 2014. The 2012 coin was issued in silver with gilt decoration and colorized faces and hands. The 2014 version was oxidized in black, making the colorized hands and faces more prominent among the four women. There was another version of the 2014 issue except it was gilded instead of oxidized.
According to Guth, all the coins can be found online fairly easy and inexpensively. The 2012 coin, however, is the most difficult to find.