Hemiobol

Akanthos, a Chalkidian colony on the Athos peninsula, issued coinage primarily to service trade through one of the northern Aegean's busiest corridors. The city's name — and its coins — would later gain grim historical footnote when Xerxes chose the Akanthos isthmus as the site for his canal in 480 BC, dug to spare the Persian fleet the dangerous rounding of Mount Athos. Local labor was conscripted; the city fed the workforce.

At this fractional weight, these were everyday transaction pieces, not prestige issues. The SNG Lockett specimen passed through one of the great early twentieth-century British collections before dispersal at Glendining's in 1955.