Hemidrachm

Lakedaimon struck silver coinage only intermittently in the Hellenistic period, and this late issue from around 85 BC falls squarely within the disruption caused by the First Mithridatic War and Sulla's devastating march through Greece. The city had lost effective autonomy centuries earlier under Macedonian hegemony and was operating under Roman oversight by this point — local civic coinage was less an economic instrument than an assertion of continued municipal identity. The BCD Peloponnesos reference places this within a tightly sequenced die study, and individual specimens can often be assigned to specific die pairings within that corpus.