Bithynia's bronze coinage presents a persistent attribution problem: Prusias I ruled from roughly 228 to 182 BC and spent much of his reign manipulating alliances between Rome and the Seleucids, while Prusias II — his son — is better remembered for harboring Hannibal after Zama and then, under Roman pressure, surrendering him to his death in 183 BC. The shared name and broadly similar bronze types across both reigns have left numismatists relying heavily on stylistic die analysis and hoard context rather than inscriptional certainty.
The Recueil and Delepierre references place this firmly within the established Bithynian sequence, but the dual attribution in the catalog entry itself reflects genuine scholarly disagreement that has not been resolved since Waddington's original groupings.
Bithynia's bronze coinage presents a persistent attribution problem: Prusias I ruled from roughly 228 to 182 BC and spent much of his reign manipulating alliances between Rome and the Seleucids, while Prusias II — his son — is better remembered for harboring Hannibal after Zama and then, under Roman pressure, surrendering him to his death in 183 BC. The shared name and broadly similar bronze types across both reigns have left numismatists relying heavily on stylistic die analysis and hoard context rather than inscriptional certainty.
The Recueil and Delepierre references place this firmly within the established Bithynian sequence, but the dual attribution in the catalog entry itself reflects genuine scholarly disagreement that has not been resolved since Waddington's original groupings.