Hemidrachm

Melos sat awkwardly in the Aegean throughout the fifth and fourth centuries — nominally Dorian, stubbornly neutral, and ultimately destroyed for it. The Athenians besieged the island in 416 BC, executed the adult men, and enslaved the population, an event Thucydides recorded through the famously cold Melian Dialogue. Coinage resumed only after Lysander's campaigns effectively ended Athenian imperial reach, which places the earliest issues of this series squarely in the aftermath of catastrophic depopulation and Spartan resettlement.

The hemidrachm denomination suggests a local economy rebuilding on modest terms.