Quadrans

Emporia — modern Ampurias on the Catalan coast — was a Greek foundation that became one of Rome's earliest footholds in Iberia after 218 BC. By the late Republican period the city operated with a remarkable degree of monetary autonomy, issuing small bronze fractions for local market use well after most comparable Iberian mints had been absorbed into the Roman provincial framework. This quadrans belongs to that twilight phase of civic coinage, struck somewhere in the contested decades between Caesar's campaigns in Spain and Augustus's final consolidation of the western provinces.