Onkia

Eryx was a Elymian city perched atop Monte San Giuliano in western Sicily, stubbornly non-Greek in character despite centuries of Hellenic pressure from the coast. Its bronze coinage of this period reflects a city caught between Carthaginian dominance and sporadic Syracusan intervention — Dionysius I seized Eryx around 397 BC, and the city changed hands repeatedly over the following decades. The onkia denomination, the twelfth-part of a litra, was the smallest unit in the Sicilian bronze system and rarely survived in collectible condition given its size and the region's acidic soils.