Tetradrachm

Messana's coinage of this period reflects the city's precarious position during the final, catastrophic phase of the Athenian expedition to Sicily. The city had been refounded by Anaxilas around 488 BC after he expelled the original Zanklaean population and repopulated it with Messenians from the Peloponnese — a colonial identity the coinage consistently asserted. By 412–408 BC, Syracuse had destroyed the Athenian fleet at the Great Harbor, and the regional power balance was shifting rapidly toward Carthaginian intervention in the west.

The Caltabiano corpus remains the authoritative die study for this series.