Nomos

Tarentum's silver nomoi from this period belong to the city's early coinage, produced roughly a generation after the colony had established its mint. Founded by Spartan settlers — specifically, according to tradition, by the Partheniai, a group of disputed status expelled from Sparta around 706 BC — Tarentum carried Laconian cultural and religious ties that shaped its iconographic choices for centuries. The dolphin rider type is directly connected to the Tarentine legend of Phalanthos, the colony's founder, said to have been saved from shipwreck by a dolphin.

The incuse reverse technique visible on earlier South Italian issues had largely given way by this period to full relief on both faces — a shift that places this piece within the transitional generation of Tarentine coinage.