Mytilene's silver tetradrachms of this period were struck under the civic coinage revival that followed the city's complicated relationship with the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon — a relationship that swung between alliance and subordination across the second century BC. By around 160 BC, Mytilene was operating with enough autonomy to issue substantial silver on its own authority, though Roman influence in the eastern Aegean was already beginning to compress the independence of Greek poleis in ways that would become definitive within a generation.
SNG Copenhagen 393 places this piece among a well-documented sequence, but individual die studies of Mytilenean coinage remain incomplete — the full die corpus for this civic series has never been systematically published.
Mytilene's silver tetradrachms of this period were struck under the civic coinage revival that followed the city's complicated relationship with the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon — a relationship that swung between alliance and subordination across the second century BC. By around 160 BC, Mytilene was operating with enough autonomy to issue substantial silver on its own authority, though Roman influence in the eastern Aegean was already beginning to compress the independence of Greek poleis in ways that would become definitive within a generation.
SNG Copenhagen 393 places this piece among a well-documented sequence, but individual die studies of Mytilenean coinage remain incomplete — the full die corpus for this civic series has never been systematically published.