Stater - Mithridates VI Eupator Tomis

Minted at Tomis on the Black Sea coast during Mithridates VI's First Mithridatic War against Rome, this issue belongs to one of the most politically charged coinage programs of the late Hellenistic world. In 88 BC, Mithridates orchestrated the massacre of an estimated 80,000 Roman and Italian civilians across Asia Minor in a single coordinated day — the Asiatic Vespers — and these staters funded the military campaign that preceded and followed it. Tomis, a Greek city in what is now Romania, fell within his expanding Pontic dominion over the western Black Sea littoral during precisely this window.