Stater

These staters were struck to fund Carthage's military campaigns in Sicily, where the city maintained a contested presence against Syracuse for generations. The timing aligns with the intensifying conflicts of the mid-fourth century, when Carthaginian forces under successive suffetes required reliable, high-value coinage to pay mercenary troops — Libyan, Iberian, and Campanian soldiers who demanded gold, not credit.

Jenkins and Lewis's classification of this type placed it within a tightly argued chronological sequence based on die links and stylistic progression, a framework that remains the standard reference for Punic gold despite being published in 1963.