Melos maintained its independence and its mint through the early years of the Peloponnesian War, but the island's fate was sealed in 416 BC when Athens, frustrated by Melian neutrality, besieged and took the city. The men were executed, the women and children enslaved — an event Thucydides recorded in the Melian Dialogue. Staters struck in the decade before that destruction are, by definition, among the final products of this mint.
Jameson 1300 is a tightly defined reference point for this series, placing this piece within a small corpus of authenticated Melian silver.
Melos maintained its independence and its mint through the early years of the Peloponnesian War, but the island's fate was sealed in 416 BC when Athens, frustrated by Melian neutrality, besieged and took the city. The men were executed, the women and children enslaved — an event Thucydides recorded in the Melian Dialogue. Staters struck in the decade before that destruction are, by definition, among the final products of this mint.
Jameson 1300 is a tightly defined reference point for this series, placing this piece within a small corpus of authenticated Melian silver.