Tetradrachm

Rhegion's tetradrachms of this period were struck at a moment of acute political tension in the western Mediterranean. The city, a Chalcidian foundation on the toe of Italy, had recently survived the catastrophic destruction of its sister city Messana by the Sicilian tyrant Anaxilas's successors and faced persistent pressure from both Syracuse and the expanding Oscan populations moving down the peninsula. The dies of this issue are attributed to engravers working in the so-called "severe style," a transitional idiom between archaic rigidity and the high classical naturalism that Syracusan artists would soon perfect.

The multiple corpus references here — Lockett, Lloyd, ANS, McClean — reflect how widely dispersed examples became through the great early twentieth-century collections before institutional acquisition thinned the market considerably.