Hemidrachm - 103rd Olympiad

The 103rd Olympiad fell in 368 BC, a year when the sanctuary at Olympia was operating under unusual political strain. Elis, which had traditionally controlled the games and the mint, had been stripped of that authority by Sparta in 400 BC and then restored — the intervening decades left the coinage chronology of the sanctuary genuinely contested among specialists. Whether this hemidrachm was struck under Elean administration or during a period of external interference remains a point of scholarly disagreement tied directly to the dating of the BCD series.