16 Litrai - Philistis

Philistis was the wife of Hieron II, whose nearly fifty-year reign over Syracuse represented one of the longest and most stable periods of autonomous rule in the Greek West. These silver litrai were struck in her name during the final years of that arrangement — Hieron died in 215 BC, and the city's subsequent alliance shift toward Carthage and away from Rome brought a Roman siege under Marcellus that ended Syracusan independence by 212 BC. Coins bearing her name were almost certainly no longer being produced by then.

The denomination itself — sixteen litrai — reflects the hybrid monetary accounting of Sicily, where Greek litra-based reckoning was mapped onto heavier Hellenistic weight standards.