Tetradrachm

The Cotini occupied territory in the northern Carpathian basin — roughly modern Slovakia and adjacent parts of Poland — and are documented by Tacitus as a Celtic people who had been subjugated and were paying tribute to both the Iazyges and the Quadi by the first century AD. Their coinage, however, belongs to an earlier period of greater autonomy, derived from the Macedonian tetradrachm tradition that spread north through the Balkans following Alexander's campaigns. These pieces represent a late stage of that transmission, when Macedonian prototypes had been abstracted over successive generations of Celtic die-cutting into highly stylized forms.