Nomos

Tarentum's nomoi of this decade were minted under the shadow of a city increasingly unable to defend itself. Caught between the expanding Roman Republic to the north and various Italic peoples, Tarentum lurched between diplomatic overtures and military miscalculation — culminating in the incident of 282 BC when the city's population attacked a Roman fleet that had violated treaty restrictions in the Gulf of Taranto. That provocation triggered the chain of events that brought Pyrrhus of Epirus across the Adriatic in 280 BC.

Vlasto 665 falls within the sequence attributed to the magistrate responsible for authorizing this emission, placing production squarely in those final years of nominal Tarentine independence before Pyrrhic intervention transformed the city into a staging ground for someone else's war.