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Tyndaris was founded in 396 BC by Dionysius I of Syracuse as a military colony, settled largely by Messenian exiles and surviving troops from the disastrous Carthaginian siege of Himera. The city's bronze coinage of this period was struck under Syracusan political orbit but maintained its own civic identity — a careful balancing act during the turbulent decades spanning the Pyrrhic War and the First Punic War, when Sicily became the first major theater of Roman military expansion outside the Italian peninsula. Tyndaris itself surrendered to Rome around 254 BC, and civic bronze issues continued under the new order until Roman administrative consolidation effectively ended autonomous local minting.