The Magnetes were a Thessalian ethnos occupying the coastal strip east of the Thessalian plain, and their autonomous bronze issues were struck during a politically compressed window — the decades following Roman reorganization of Macedonia and Thessaly after Pydna in 168 BC. Roman administrative pressure steadily curtailed the coinage rights of regional Greek communities throughout this period, making the Magnetes' continued civic issues something of a minor assertion of local identity within an increasingly Roman-supervised Greece.
The BCD collection, from which the primary reference derives, remains the definitive assembled corpus for Thessalian bronzes of this type.
The Magnetes were a Thessalian ethnos occupying the coastal strip east of the Thessalian plain, and their autonomous bronze issues were struck during a politically compressed window — the decades following Roman reorganization of Macedonia and Thessaly after Pydna in 168 BC. Roman administrative pressure steadily curtailed the coinage rights of regional Greek communities throughout this period, making the Magnetes' continued civic issues something of a minor assertion of local identity within an increasingly Roman-supervised Greece.
The BCD collection, from which the primary reference derives, remains the definitive assembled corpus for Thessalian bronzes of this type.