The portrait in left profile of Homer is accompanied by a legend which indicates his name in Greek.

Homer is the name ascribed by the ancient Greeks to the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems which are the central works of ancient Greek literature. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, but focuses on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles lasting a few weeks during the last year of the war. The Odyssey focuses on the journey home of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy.

Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity, the most widespread being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. The modern scholarly consensus is that these traditions do not have any historical value. The Homeric Question - by whom, when, where and under what circumstances were the Iliad and Odyssey composed - continues to be debated. From antiquity until the present day, the influence of the Homeric epics on Western civilization has been great, inspiring many of its most famous works of literature, music, and visual art.

Engraver: K. Kazakos

An ancient sailing ship (Trireme) is surrounded with the facial value, year of issue and the inscription "Republic of Greece".

A trireme was an ancient vessel and a type of galley that was used by the ancient maritime civilizations of the Mediterranean, especially the Phoenicians, ancient Greeks and Romans. The trireme derives its name from its three rows of oars, manned with one man per oar. As a ship it was fast and agile, and it was the dominant warship in the Mediterranean during the 7th to 4th centuries BC, after which it was largely superseded by the larger quadriremes and quinqueremes. Triremes played a vital role in the Persian Wars, the creation of the Athenian maritime empire, and its downfall in the Peloponnesian War.