Tetradrachm - Asklepiades

Abydos, positioned at the narrowest crossing of the Hellespont, retained enough commercial relevance in the late Republican period to sustain a local silver coinage well into the first century BC — no small feat for a city increasingly absorbed into Roman provincial administration. The magistrate name Asklepiades appearing on this issue places it within a sequence of civic tetradrachms that scholars have used to reconstruct the city's administrative calendar, though the precise chronology of individual magistrates remains contested.

The series to which this piece belongs drew on Lysimachean weight standards, a deliberate archaism signaling continuity with earlier Hellenistic monetary convention even as that convention was rapidly becoming obsolete.