Tetradrachm - Dionysas

Abdera, a Thasian colony on the Thracian coast, punched well above its geopolitical weight as a silver-issuing authority in the fifth century BC, its coinage sustained by access to Thracian silver sources. The city's magistrate-series tetradrachms — each naming a local official responsible for the issue — give modern scholars an unusually granular picture of civic administration for a polis of this size. The Dionysas issue falls within a prolific signing sequence documented by J. Melville Jones and catalogued exhaustively by John May.

Abdera was sacked by the Triballi around 376 BC, which effectively ends the city's numismatic ambitions at scale.