Half Unit

The Brettii — a Samnite-derived confederation occupying the toe of the Italian peninsula — struck their own coinage almost entirely because of Hannibal. After the Carthaginian victories at Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae, the Brettii defected from Rome in 216 BC, and independent coinage followed as a direct assertion of that break. This bronze fraction belongs to the tight window before Roman reconquest effectively ended Bruttian autonomy and, with it, their mint activity.