Hemidrachm

Patrai's coinage in the final decades before Augustus reorganized the Greek west sits at the edge of the Achaean collapse — the city had been refounded as a Roman colony by Augustus himself around 14 BC, which makes any civic silver issue predating that transformation a product of the last gasp of autonomous municipal coinage in the region. Whether this piece circulated into the colonial period or was retired when the new Augustan monetary apparatus took hold is an open question the wear pattern on any given example tends to answer.