Tetradrachm

These tetradrachms belong to the so-called "fine style" period of Syracusan coinage, when the city's engravers were producing what many scholars consider the finest die work in the Greek world. The decade in question coincides with Syracuse at the height of its power following the expulsion of the Deinomenid tyrants in 466 and the consolidation of democratic government — a city flush with Sicilian grain wealth and confident enough to spend it on artisans.

The Boehringer sequence places these dies within a tightly documented progression, allowing specialists to date individual specimens to within a few years based on stylistic drift alone. Dewing 817 is a particularly well-provenanced specimen against which others in this range are often benchmarked.