Stater

Melos remained one of the few Aegean islands to resist Athenian alliance pressure during the early Peloponnesian War, a position that made its independent coinage politically loaded. The island's neutrality ended violently in 416 BC when Athens besieged and captured it, executing the men and enslaving the women and children — an event Thucydides recorded in the Melian Dialogue. Staters struck in the decade before that destruction are among the last coins this mint would ever produce.

The references here — Lockett, Jameson, McClean — all derive from early 20th-century private collections, suggesting this type passed through several major cabinets before modern cataloguing stabilized its attribution.