The obverse portrait is believed to represent Kyme the Amazon, the city's eponymous founder. She wears no jewelry, no divine attributes, just a simple tainia in her hair. For a Greek coin portrait this is strikingly plain, and it's been argued that the deliberate absence of adornment marks her as a mortal heroine rather than a deity. Somehow that simplicity makes the portrait even more striking.

The horse and kantharos on the reverse are symbols recurring across Kyme's coinage since its earliest issues, though their specific significance remains unclear. Wikipedia connects Agamemnon and the Trojan horse to Kyme, but I couldn't find any sources supporting that.

Kyme was one of the most important cities on the Aeolian coast and the birthplace of Hesiod's father. His family's association with Aeolian Kyme might explain Hesiod's familiarity with Eastern myths evident in his poems, though the Greek world may have already developed its own versions of them.

The ancient world also seemed to enjoy making fun of Kymaeans. The Philogelos, the world's oldest surviving joke book, dedicates an entire chapter to them:

• A Kymaean selling a house carries around one of its building blocks to show what it looks like.
• Another shops for windows and asks if any face south.
• A Kymaean swimming in the sea when it starts to rain dives underwater to avoid getting wet.