Didrachm - Seuthes Type II

Seuthes II secured his throne through a direct alliance with Xenophon and the Ten Thousand during their famous retreat — the Anabasis records him recruiting Greek mercenaries in 400 BC and promptly failing to pay them in full, a grievance Xenophon documents with considerable irritation. This didrachm was struck roughly a decade later, once Seuthes had consolidated enough power over the Odrysian splinter kingdom to issue silver coinage in his own name, a privilege that had belonged exclusively to the unified Odrysian state under Sitalces and Seuthes I.

The type is rare by any measure. Peykov's corpus remains the authoritative die study, and known specimens number in the dozens rather than the hundreds.