Obol

Aegina's fractional coinage of this period was already something of an anachronism. The island had been expelled from its own harbor by Athens in 431 BC, its population deported and replaced with Athenian cleruchs, and the surviving Aeginetans scattered across the Peloponnese. It was only after Sparta's victory in 404 BC that they were permitted to return. The coins struck in the following decades carry that complicated history — an island reasserting its oldest monetary tradition, the turtle coinage predating Athenian owls by at least a generation, in the shadow of a polis that had nearly erased it entirely.