Dekadrachm - Dionysios I

The large silver dekadrachms of Dionysios I were not general circulation coinage — at 43 grams, they were functionally impractical for daily trade. The prevailing view is that they served as donatives or prize money, possibly connected to the Assinarian Games established after Syracuse's catastrophic defeat of the Athenian expedition in 413 BC, or as military pay disbursements during Dionysios's protracted wars against Carthage in the 390s.

The engravers responsible for this series — almost certainly working within the tradition established by Kimon and Euainetos in the preceding generation — signed their dies, a Syracusan practice that makes individual hands traceable across the surviving corpus.