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Adranon — modern Adrano, on the southwestern slope of Etna — was founded by Dionysius I of Syracuse around 400 BC, partly as a buffer settlement and partly to control the Simeto River valley. The city took its name from the Sikel fire-deity Adranos, whose cult was already established there and whose sacred precinct housed a famous pack of a thousand dogs said to guide the drunk and the pious home from the temple. That deity gave the city both its identity and its coinage program.

This bronze falls within the earliest decades of the mint's operation, before Syracuse tightened its grip on interior Sicilian communities following the wars with Carthage.