Stater - Charo

Thebes struck these staters during one of the most consequential decades in Greek history — the period beginning with the liberation of the Kadmeia in 379 BC, when a small group of Theban exiles expelled the Spartan garrison and triggered a collapse of Spartan hegemony that culminated at Leuktra in 371 BC. The mint was operating under the Boeotian League at a moment when Theban political ambition was, for the first time, genuinely continental in scope.

The Charo designation refers to the magistrate's name appearing on the coin, part of the Theban practice of rotating officials responsible for coinage — a prosopographical record that has allowed scholars to sequence these issues with unusual precision relative to most Greek civic coinages.