Naxos was the earliest Greek colony in Sicily, founded around 734 BC, and it met a violent end in 403 BC when Dionysius I of Syracuse razed the city, enslaved its population, and gave the land to the Sicels. The coins produced in Naxos's final decades — this hemidrachm among them — represent the last output of a mint that would never strike again. No successor city continued the coinage.
The Cahn corpus remains the authoritative die study for Naxian issues, with the late fifth-century hemidrachms representing a relatively small documented die pool.
Naxos was the earliest Greek colony in Sicily, founded around 734 BC, and it met a violent end in 403 BC when Dionysius I of Syracuse razed the city, enslaved its population, and gave the land to the Sicels. The coins produced in Naxos's final decades — this hemidrachm among them — represent the last output of a mint that would never strike again. No successor city continued the coinage.
The Cahn corpus remains the authoritative die study for Naxian issues, with the late fifth-century hemidrachms representing a relatively small documented die pool.