Tetradrachm

These "New Style" tetradrachms replaced Athens' archaic "owl" coinage around 165 BC following pressure — likely Roman — to modernize the city's monetary output. Unlike the old owls, which had circulated virtually unchanged for two centuries, the New Style series introduced annual magistrate names stamped on each issue, making individual emissions datable to specific years of office. Thompson's exhaustive 1961 corpus remains the essential reference for sorting them.

This particular emission falls within the early phase of the series, when Athenian commercial reach across the Aegean was already being undercut by Rome's declaration of Delos as a free port in 166 BC — a deliberate economic blow to Rhodian and Athenian trading dominance.