Tetradrachm - Eusebes In the name of Alexander III

Chios entered the posthumous Alexander coinage tradition relatively late, striking these tetradrachms under the civic magistrate name Eusebes sometime in the early-to-mid second century BC. By this point the type had become essentially a trade currency convention across the eastern Aegean, and Chios — a prosperous mercantile island with established commercial ties to Rhodes and the Attalid kingdom — had practical reasons to issue coinage in a format universally accepted by merchants who might not trust purely civic issues. The magistrate name serves as the closest thing to a local fingerprint on an otherwise deliberately internationalized coin.