Obol

Himera sat on Sicily's north coast as one of the westernmost Greek settlements on the island, sharing a frontier with Phoenician and later Carthaginian territory. The city's coinage began early by Sicilian standards, and these small silver fractions were the workhorses of daily market exchange — fish, oil, grain — at a scale no larger denomination could serve. The archaic style of this period predates Himera's most famous historical moment by half a century: the battle of 480 BC, where a Greek coalition destroyed a Carthaginian force on the same day as Salamis, after which the city struck its celebrated victory issues.